Built on another company's platform

Team of 2 to 10 · 45 months after launch, revenue falling

It appeared in January 2023 inside Google Slides, a program where people already work, when writing slides from one sentence was new, and users showed it to each other without paid advertising. A blog about presentation topics then brought about 80% of new users from Google search, by the founder's account. Both channels weakened: search traffic fell, and Google added the same function to Slides. The verified total is real, and so is the fall: monthly revenue fell by half between February and July 2026.

Solo founder · 7 months after launch, revenue growing

It went where the users already were: an app in ChatGPT's app store, a plugin in Claude's directory and in Claude Code, and setups for Cursor and Codex, in the months when these directories were new. It charges per tool call instead of a share of ad spend, so a small advertiser starts at US$49 a month. And it applied to the platforms' own API programs; the company says Google approved it in June 2026 and Amazon admitted it to its partner network.

Team of 2 to 10 · 5 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder already ran a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency and built the lead tool that the agency needed. He sold it with the tool itself: traxy found the leads, and his team contacted them. Daily posts on X added trials, and credit-based prices let heavy users pay more.

Team of 2 to 10 · 26 months after launch, revenue flat

It sold one narrow job to a group that already existed: people who learn from YouTube channels and paid courses how to publish many simple books on Amazon. The product carries that group's own word in its name, tutorial channels in English and Italian showed it from January 2025, and the site runs an affiliate script. Two thirds of the US$642,409 came in the first 14 months, at about US$30,300 a month. The last 12 months average about US$17,600 a month.

Team of 2 to 10 · 34 months after launch, revenue falling

It entered a market where people already paid for tools such as Taplio, and did the one core task better: writing the post. The founders' public posts brought the first customers and a lifetime-deal platform, and that deal paid for growth without investors. Subscriptions, partnerships with LinkedIn influencers, affiliates and a move to team plans came after.

Team of 2 to 10 · 30 months after launch, revenue falling

Agencies that resell AI voice agents have the AI already; what they lack is a way to look like a company to thirty clients: a branded portal, usage billing and automations. ChatDash sells that layer and prices it per client slot, so it grows with the agency's client list. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$602,728 of revenue in total and US$19,893 of monthly recurring revenue from 113 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, about US$176 a subscription, after a fall of 60% from the best month in the table, November 2025.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 14 months after launch

Gemini Notebook had more than 30 million users and no folders, no export and no public API for personal accounts. Kortex sold the missing half for a few dollars a month, found its users in the Chrome Web Store, where Google marked it Featured, and in two lifetime-deal launches. The founder wrote that more than 100,000 users came 'without a single ad'. Most of the verified revenue arrived in February and March 2026, when a US$49 lifetime licence was on sale.

Solo founder · 14 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder had made Roblox games for nine years, with 200 million visits on his own games, and his launch post on the official Roblox developer forum was read 112,656 times. He launched free, with 1 million tokens a month, and charged US$20 a month for heavy use. Then he added top-ups and a marketplace of tested systems that the AI installs, instead of writing every system from nothing.

Team of 2 to 10 · 42 months after launch, revenue falling

The plugin lives inside Obsidian's community plugin store, which the founder says gave it organic growth with no ads or paid creators: 300,000 downloads by the end of 2024, 1 million by February 2026 and 2 million by October 2026. The code is free, so there was nothing to sell until the company added a managed layer on top: hosted models, web search and tools that work without any setup. One-time lifetime plans, first Believer and then Supporter, brought large payments in single months. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$913,644 of revenue in total and US$17,899 of monthly recurring revenue from 1,356 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, after a fall of about 51% from the best month, February 2026.

Team of 2 to 10 · 16 months after launch, revenue falling

The founder had the problem himself. Upwork had become his agency's best sales channel, but 10,000 jobs a day are posted around the clock and he could cover only about 8% of them by hand. He built the tool for his own agency and charged agency owners a business price from the start. Two Upwork coaches, who advise freelancers and agencies, switched their clients to it as affiliates, and that produced most of the growth.

Solo founder · 25 months after launch, revenue flat

It started as a free Chrome extension that the founder built for his father, then sold unlimited dictation everywhere for a low monthly price. The AI model is cheap to rent: Groq lists Whisper at US$0.04 to US$0.111 per hour of audio. Users came from Google: the site has more than 1,000 pages, one for each app and each need, and the founder says that an AI agent he made writes the blog posts.

Team of 2 to 10 · 17 months after launch, revenue falling

It puts the AI where German students already write, inside Word and in German, and each suggestion carries a citation from the student's own PDFs, so the student does not have to fear invented sources. A free plan without a time limit brings students in, and a monthly plan sold for the months in which they write turns some of them into paying customers.

Solo founder · 35 months after launch, revenue falling

It reached people inside the chat app that they already open all day, so capturing an idea on a phone took one voice note. It aimed first at Notion users, whom the company told that ideas get lost on the phone. Ads on Facebook and Google then paid for fast growth in early 2026, until the founder stopped them in August 2026 because the costs were larger than the revenue.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue falling

People already pay for an assistant and already ask it for pictures and video. CreativeClaw sells inside that conversation, so it needs no interface of its own, no sales calls and no provider accounts on the customer's side. Revenue stayed under US$5,300 a month for five months, then rose about 18 times in September 2026, after the founder had packaged the server for ChatGPT and prepared its entry in the plugin directories. He has not published the cause of the rise.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue falling

The founder was a LinkedIn ghostwriter with about 44,000 followers and a newsletter of about 17,000 readers, so he sold to an audience that already read him. He built the product around the interview that he used to do by hand for clients, instead of a text box that asks a model to write. The verified revenue grew from US$574 in April 2026 to US$19,343 in September 2026.

Team of 2 to 10 · 25 months after launch, revenue growing

Heavy users of AI chat apps lose old answers, because the apps had no folders, no filtered search and no bulk export. AI Toolbox adds these inside the apps, for four apps at once, sells them mostly as one-time licenses, and, by the seller's account, finds its buyers through search pages instead of ads.

Team of 2 to 10 · 32 months after launch, revenue falling

It sold one promise that a customer can measure: a first reply to every new lead within 10 seconds, to businesses that already pay for many leads through Meta ads. A demo on the website brought sales calls through organic search before the product was built. Revenue then fell from US$9,000 to US$12,000 a month in late 2025 to under US$2,000 in September 2026, in the same months in which the founder launched other products.

Solo founder · 14 months after launch, revenue falling

In n8n each node has its own settings, and Synta says that "Most AI tools hallucinate n8n configs", which means they invent settings that do not exist. Synta sells the missing knowledge: a database of more than 800 node schemas, workflow patterns and templates, plus a loop that runs the workflow and repairs it. It is a narrow product for the users of one platform, sold as a subscription from US$34 a month.

Solo founder · 2 months after launch, revenue flat

AI coding agents can build a working page or deck, but in the founder's words their visual output often looks generic. Skillry sells finished visual styles, one task per Skill, shows real output before the sale, and adds new Skills almost every day under one subscription. When sales began on 28 September 2026, they held at about US$430 a day for 17 days.

Solo founder · 12 months after launch, revenue falling

It launched in October 2025, when Anthropic's Claude Code had made skills, slash commands and subagents a normal way to steer a coding agent, and when most developers were still writing their own. A founder who presents themself as a CTO with 18 years of experience sold a tested set as a one-time purchase with a money-back promise. Verified revenue reached US$16,040 in March 2026 and US$82,195 in total, but it fell to under US$2,000 a month by September 2026.

Team of 2 to 10 · 12 months after launch, revenue growing

One-shot text-to-3D generators give a mesh that is hard to edit. 3D-Agent works inside the program that 3D artists already use and builds real Blender objects that they can change. It rents the AI models instead of training its own, sells only paid plans, and limits each plan by prompts and steps, so each prompt has a known maximum cost.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder first gave away the same idea as free open-source code, which collected about 2,000 GitHub stars, and he already had a free Chrome extension with at least 10,000 users among search specialists. The paid version removes the installation work and adds data that the free code does not have. Most of the first buyers came from that existing audience.

Team of 2 to 10 · 47 months after launch, revenue falling

It put a language model inside Google Sheets from November 2022, and Google's marketplace brought more than 201,000 installs. Few installs paid: US$52,136 of verified revenue in 47 months is about US$0.26 per install. Its most important result may be indirect: a request for a pitch deck for SheetAI led the founder to build MagicSlides, which by its own verified data earned about 14 times as much. SheetAI's own revenue is now falling, and Google has offered a similar AI function inside Sheets since June 2025.

Solo founder · 15 months after launch, revenue falling

It does the work in the cells instead of explaining what to paste, and it works in the Excel that people already have, without a Microsoft Copilot license. The founder already taught Excel to a large French audience. The AI models are bought by the request from OpenAI and Anthropic, so one person could build and run it.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue growing

The compression engine already existed as a free, open-source Python tool, but it was hard to install. Garm Lucassen packaged it into a desktop app that installs with a double click, connects the coding agents by itself and removes its changes when it quits. The engine's creator suggested that he build it and keep the Headroom name. Developers who hit the usage limits of their AI plans pay a small monthly price to make those limits last longer.

Solo founder · 11 months after launch, revenue growing

Google released a much better image model in August 2025, and earlier virtual try-on needed 3D scans and long integration projects. The founder, a freelance developer who had already built a similar Shopify app, built a first version in a week and a half and listed it in the Shopify App Store, where, he said, the app's ranking then brought most of the organic traffic. A dashboard screenshot that the founder gave to the French newsletter Founder Trace showed US$14,150.87 in monthly recurring revenue eleven months after the listing.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 15 months after launch

Two founders shipped eleven products in about four months and kept the one that made money. They sold it on the platform it served, gave an audience owner a share of profits instead of a sponsorship fee, and used a language model to make writing faster, not to replace it. Fifteen months after launch, with about US$1 million a year in revenue, they sold to a larger French software company run by a former schoolmate.

Team of 2 to 10 · 8 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder had already grown one tool for dropshippers, Minea, to US$750,000 a month of recurring revenue by his own account, by putting a YouTube creator in the founding team. He repeated the same method: a creator co-founder whose videos bring the customers, a product that shows its result in a few minutes, and a free version that charges only at the moment of publishing.

Team of 2 to 10 · 11 months after launch, revenue growing

Three of the four co-founders had LinkedIn audiences, together more than 480,000 followers, made of the people Kleo sells to, and the free extension had already reached tens of thousands of users. When LinkedIn stopped the extension, they sold a rebuilt paid version to that audience first, in limited groups of seats, before any public launch.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 7 months after launch

After a first product of their own that nobody bought, the founders copied a kind of Shopify app that already earned money, and sold it in France, where few competitors sold it. They found customers only by cold outreach, with tools that cost about US$380 a month. By their account they sold the company seven months after the App Store launch, when sales outside France became hard.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 31 months after launch

The founder had already built one of the largest audiences on LinkedIn by posting about AI every day, so the product had buyers on the day it launched. It sold one plan at about US$60 a month, as a US$2-a-day ghostwriter against US$2,000 to US$3,000 for a human one, and his employees grew their own accounts with it and sold it for a commission.

Team of 2 to 10 · 29 months after launch, revenue growing

The founders sold the idea before they built it, and built it with a no-code tool so that one person could change it every day. Then they cut the product down to the one use that brought 70% of the revenue. They placed it inside the help desks that customers already pay for, and priced it below the AI agents that the help-desk vendors sell themselves.

Team of 2 to 10 · 11 months after launch, revenue growing

An Amazon seller who could not code built the research tool he needed in 48 hours with Cursor, then offered it to Legacy X, a coaching program for Amazon sellers that he had bought two years earlier. Legacy X took a share of the business, and its students were the customers from the first day. He says it reached US$10,000 a month in 30 days and US$30,000 a month by June 2026.

Solo founder · 20 months after launch

It shipped within a week of ChatGPT's release, when ChatGPT had no folders and weak search, and it was free, so it spread through the Chrome Web Store. A daily AI newsletter shown inside the extension turned the users into an audience that sponsors paid to reach, and a Pro plan added subscriptions ten months after launch.

Solo founder · 23 months after launch

It appeared in December 2022 as a free Chrome extension that put ChatGPT inside the Gmail reply box, and the company says it was the first to do so. The founder says they shared it on Reddit and it grew from there. A free version that used the visitor's own ChatGPT account built a large base of installs, and a paid version on the company's own servers followed in 2023.

Team of 2 to 10 · 14 months after launch

Online shops send the same abandoned-cart and viewed-product email to every customer, because writing more versions takes people. A rented language model made one unique email per recipient cheap. Alvas sold this first through a Danish email marketing agency that set it up for its clients, and showed the gains with tests against the shops' old emails.

Team of 2 to 10 · 64 months after launch, revenue falling

It solves one narrow problem for a very large app: WhatsApp users who chat with people in another language and do not want to copy every message into a translator. The app has been on Google Play since June 2021 and counts more than 700,000 installs. The Flippa listing says all growth was organic, that the translation API costs about US$20 a month, and that the app needs about two hours of work a week.

Solo founder · 9 months after launch, revenue falling

Resellers decide in the shop whether an item is worth buying, and later write a sales listing for each item they bought. The app does both steps from one photo. The Flippa listing states that it was paid for by weekly and annual subscriptions, that most downloads came from App Store search and Apple Search Ads, and that the API and software cost about US$35 a month.

Team of 2 to 10 · 16 months after launch

It shipped a working summarizer two months after ChatGPT appeared, launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News in the same month, and then turned every summary into a public web page that ranks in Google. Starter Story, which estimates revenue from public data, put it at about US$45,000 a month in May 2024 with three people.

Team of 2 to 10 · 23 months after launch, revenue growing

The first version was an AI copilot for DevOps engineers, who could build their own agents. The founders moved the product to non-technical teams that answer the same questions all day, started every customer with one small use (repeated questions in Slack), and added a higher-priced plan when power users asked for more agents. The founder said in an interview of 17 October 2025, as quoted by SoFarBot, that this took the company from US$100,000 to US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Solo founder · 27 months after launch

The founder built it for his own inbox, published the code from the first day and launched it on Product Hunt the day after Christmas 2023, where he says it finished first. The open-source community, two newsletters and the GitHub trending page brought the first thousands of users. According to the Startup Founder Stories summary of his Indie Hackers interview, he then narrowed the product to a niche when larger competitors arrived and reached US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue about a year after the first customer.

Solo founder · 3 months after launch

It came out on 11 January 2023, when ChatGPT "has been all over the headlines recently", as MusicRadar wrote that day, and music writers were curious about any new use of OpenAI's models, and articles in MusicRadar, Fast Company and other outlets followed. The founder said in April 2023 that most users came from his posts on Twitter and that the press coverage kept bringing new people. He also said it took two weeks after the January launch to reach US$2,000 in revenue.