29 Technical Founders That Went On To Start A Successful Company

Hi, my name is Jared Brown and I am a co-founder of Hubstaff. We started the company eight years ago to build a time tracking tool that included “proof of work”. The initial goal was to solve the issue of non-developer owners and managers not knowing how long development tasks should take and feeling helpless when they suspected the freelancers they hired were billing them for more hours than they were actually working.

At the time there were very few software tools that could provide proof that the freelancer was working. The “proof of work” usually takes the form of screenshots or other forms of activity tracking via a desktop app. We have settings that let you turn any aspect of the monitoring on or off. A lot of customers nowadays are coming to us because we’re one of the most robust general time tracking solutions on the market and they don’t even use the monitoring features.

We were fortunate in that there was a strong need for this product from the very beginning and that there was a lot of search volume that was ready to be captured by someone. The pain point is so great for our customers that they’re literally waking up in the morning after a restless night’s sleep and searching for a tool that can take screenshots. It made me realize how valuable it is to build a product that customers are actively searching out.

Hello! My name is Jacob Montoya and I am the founder of FitSW and its sister site FindTrainGain. With FitSW, we provide software to personal trainers to help them grow their businesses and enable them to use our technology to effectively manage their clients’ fitness. With FindTrainGain, we enable people searching for fitness help from all over the world to join a wide variety of Live Online Fitness Classes led by fun, energetic Fitness Instructors.

FitSW is a software platform that has helped over 20,000 personal trainers, studios, and gyms manage every aspect of their businesses. FitSW enables personal trainers to create workouts, track progress, plan meals, accept payments, manage schedules, and more all through our iOS, Android, and web applications.

The trainer’s clients can also use the app as well to interact and collaborate with the trainer as they progress through their fitness or nutrition plans. We operate on freemium software as a service model. Our mission is to provide exceptional and simple-to-use software that empowers fitness professionals worldwide to grow their businesses and make the world a healthier place.

By profession, I’m a front-end developer. From 2012 to 2014 I worked as a freelancer on different platforms such as Fiverr and freelancer.com. In the year 2014 80% of the projects I was awarded were about the travel industry such as websites for hotel room reservations, flight booking or tour packages offer, and so on.

Even if your idea did not work your skills will help you to succeed with the next startup so never compromise when it comes to tech.

Researching on Google one day I found only a few companies were working specifically in the travel tech industry. Those days I was planning to have an office and build a company but for that, I needed to identify what services to offer first.

Hello Readers, I am Junaid Ansari, and with Amin Memon, I have co-founded Draftss.com which is a productized graphic design & frontend code service on subscription starting from just $89/week.

With Draftss you can get all kinds of design services from branding, logo, illustrations, landing pages, app UX/UI, t-shirts, packaging, ads, pitch decks, social media graphics & just about everything else within graphics. Along with designing we also provide frontend code in HTML/CSS or on WordPress using builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver, Oxygen, WPBakery, Visual Composer, and several other independent builders like Webflow, Unbounce, etc.

One of the best propositions that our customers love at Draftss is that they can add us to their team in Slack, Trello, Airtable, Asana, Notion, Zeplin, Jira board, Git, etc. If there is a tool that we haven’t supported officially, we even go ahead to check it out if it is easy to manage and integrate it within our list of tools. We even support IMs like WhatsApp and Telegram if you prefer it over any other tool.

Hey! I’m Pete, I live in Scotland and I started No CS Degree. It’s a website a lot like Starter Story where I interview self-taught web developers that don’t have a Computer Science degree but have still made successful startups or found well-paying jobs. I was working in bookies before but someone threatened to stab my boss, so I thought I better quit and make a website instead!

The main ways I monetize the website are by getting coding boot camps to sponsor articles featuring their successful students and by having developers with tech products to sponsor my newsletter. I’ve gone from lows of a few hundred dollars to earning over $2,500 in one month. Overall the average monthly revenue is $1,100. I also have a job board for self-taught web developers and a boot camp directory where you can find the best coding boot camps. I’m working on combining those two with the main No CS Degree website.

I’m Barron and I run Effortless Gent, a men’s style publication focused on helping guys feel confident and look sharp in the clothes they wear.

Through our written articles and video content, we teach guys how to build a Lean Wardrobe, which essentially is a versatile set of clothes unique to every guy’s situation that easily mix and match and make dressing well much easier.

EG generates on average $8,000/mo through a combination of ad revenue (display ads, brand sponsorships), affiliate revenue, digital products (an eBook and self-guided style improvement program), and 1-on-1 online or in-person styling consultations.

Rakesh and I have been friends since high school when we bonded over our interest in technology and entrepreneurship. Since then, we’ve worked together on a couple of projects. Most of them didn’t pan out, but it was while working on one of these projects that we came up with the inspiration for LoginRadius.

While developing the login system for a couple of different web applications, Rakesh and I realized what a hassle it would be for users to register, between filling out long forms and remembering yet another set of username and password. In order to simplify the task for the end-user and developer, we decided to create a simplified and secure login experience and integrated this feature into our new project. Thus the concept of LoginRadius was born. We began developing it as a separate product in 2014.

We were hesitant to take the risk and quit our jobs, but these opportunities may only come once in a lifetime, and you have to grab onto them if you really feel passionate about the idea or product.

I have been a web developer as far back as I can remember. I love every detail of building cutting-edge online presences. When I was 10, I saw the Yahoo website for the first time. Long story short, I fell absolutely in love.

If you are honest with yourself and see something going wrong, recognize it and look for solutions.

I had a couple of enterprises early on, such as an online radio station and a video production business. At age 16, I founded my first official company by writing a business plan and raising $5000 from my Chemistry teacher. I built a social network for the popular game of Counter-Strike, allowing gamers to find players for their teams and instantly begin practice matches. Most of the work was outsourced to a team in India, meeting with them late at night in my car on the street.

Hello! My name is Phil Scarfi and I’m the founder of Pioneer Mobile Applications.

Pioneer is a mobile application development agency that specializes in providing rapid and affordable software development. In particular, we develop mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms alongside the web backend that helps make them run smoothly and scale efficiently. We are based out of Long Island, New York however many of our clients are located throughout the United States.

Pioneer works with a wide variety of clients ranging from startups ($10k-$50k budgets) to larger enterprise organizations ($100k+ budgets). Over the past year and a half, Pioneer has nearly tripled the amount of clients and inbound leads we have gotten, we’ll discuss how we did that a little later!

I never really thought much about being an entrepreneur from a young age, but I always had a sense that large companies and their influence over how we live our lives was not something I wanted to invest my time and talents in. I couldn’t see how it was possible for someone who worked at a company of hundreds or thousands of people to take a caring interest in the customer or community. I think this may be why most of my early jobs as a programmer were for startups or companies in the entrepreneurial space.

Under the surface most people are struggling with their own problems just like you. Take care of yourself and enjoy the journey while eyeing your goals.

Circling back to eMoods specifically, I was (and am!) one of the people that this app was set out to help. Being diagnosed with Bipolar 1 in my early 20’s, I was very frustrated with the diagnosis and figuring out which medications worked for me- I tried upwards of 20 different medications, all with terrible side effects, before settling on those with the most bearable ones. But I felt that my mania and psychosis also came with a spiritual side and that I was being pathologized and forced by a western medical system, family, and societal obligations to be “normal”. I believe we as a society talk more openly and with more acceptance about mental health issues these days (nearly 20 years later), and my views now align with the neurodivergent community, which celebrates neurodiversity in all its forms - this includes autism, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, and other atypical neurodevelopmental states. At the core, I want users of this app to be in control of their health because I felt like I wasn’t in control for a long time.

My name is Justin Anyanwu. I came to the US from Nigeria in 1998. I’m now a citizen, and every day, I thank my mother for bringing me here. I love this country.

I started Innovative Bit (Company name under which Lazy Jar was created) in October of 2016, and our flagship product is Lazy Jar, a fitness app that charges users any week they fail to work out adequately.

It was started in October of 2017 as a proof of concept. We re-launched the app this year in March, today we’re averaging $250 a month from the app.

My name is Bruno Bornsztein - I’m a web developer and entrepreneur. I started InfluenceKit to help content creators prove their value and make more money. The tool makes it easy to generate accurate, always-updated reports so influencers can show brands the real value of the sponsored content they’re creating.

Our customers are bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers and podcasters who want to increase their sponsored content revenue and better understand how their content performs on every digital channel. We currently have about 180 paying customers, including some of the top creators in the food and lifestyle content niches.

My co-founder, Chris Tuttle, showing some new users how InfluenceKit works

Hi, my name is Todd and I’m a serial entrepreneur. After a long history of building various businesses, I created ByteStand, a friendly software development company run by ecommerce nerds who get excited about weird things like “cross-platform integrations” and “fulfillment networks” and “coffee”.

We design Shopify apps, with three apps currently in the app store and over 2,000 shops using our software. Our two main apps are ByteStand and FBA Shipping, which were designed to help Amazon sellers diversify and generate more revenue by importing their Amazon inventory to Shopify and exporting their Shopify orders to Amazon for fulfillment.

We also created FreshCredit, Shopify's first true store credit app. Between all three apps, we generate about $17,000/month in revenue.

I'm Abhishek A Agrawal and I'm the founder of Integrately and CompanyHub.

Our first product was CompanyHub CRM - the world's easiest CRM. Most salespeople hate using CRMs because they are complex and time-consuming. CompanyHub is as easy as excel. They can do most of the things from a single page. It is ranked in top CRMs globally by G2, the leading software rating site.

Recently we launched Integrately - 1 click integration platform. Companies need to integrate different apps that they use for different purposes. But most integration platforms are very complex. Integrately provides ready integrations. So you can automate your processes in 1 click!

I'm Brandon Bayer, a 27-year-old developer, designer, and pilot.

Martin Holsinger (my co-founder) and I built Storeo, an iOS app for making Instagram Stories longer than 15 seconds. It's the first side project I've launched to the world.

The core function is very simple. It takes a video, splits it into 15-second segments, and finally saves it to your camera roll. After uploading each slice to Instagram, people who watch your Story will see it seamlessly transition from one to the next without any jarring transitions or cut off words.

Hey, my name is Vadim, I’m a software engineer working at a valley startup. I’m creating Lotus - a Mac app for managing GitHub notifications without stress. Lotus is for open-source maintainers like myself, who struggle to keep up with a constant stream of notifications.

I launched Lotus last week and I’ve earned $261.74 so far! I know it’s not a lot, but this is my first money as an indie developer, so it feels big to me anyway!

Hi, I’m Jason Correia. Founder of WP Manager, a WordPress Maintenance Subscription Service based in the UK.

WP Manager provides site care plans for a diverse range of clients, everything from small blog websites, to e-commerce stores, and to complex LMS systems. Our site care plans form part of our core service offering.

Hello, my name is Quinn Zeda and I am the founder and CEO of Conversion Crimes.

I’ve never had a real job as I started my first business right out of college. For the last 10 years, I’ve been running my business while traveling the world as a digital nomad. When the pandemic happened I was in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico which has now become my home.

Hey folks! I’m Joel Griffith, founder and sole entrepreneur for a business called browserless.

browserless is one of those newfangled “SaaS” businesses (software-as-a-service), and lets users automate all the stuff you’d normally have to do manually with a web browser. This can be as simple as taking screenshots of your page, perusing the internet for data, or even generating PDFs of a cool dashboard on your site.

I’ve been building the company over the last two years, and this September we did about $28,000 in sales.

Hi! I’m Wanxi Yang, the founder, and CEO of Liklist. Liklist is a novel audio app for sharing life experiences. Which facial moisture is the most suitable for my skin type? What’s the best restaurant for the first date in Boston? What is traveling in Paris really like?

These are all questions one can find answers to on Liklist. And because Liklist encourages users to actually talk about their experiences by recording their voices with the audio recorder on our app, the content on the app feels more authentic and trustworthy.

My name is Todd Hooper, and I’m a software engineer. I founded Prerender.io in 2014. Prerender.io allows search engines to crawl SEO-friendly versions of React, Angular, and Javascript websites.

As a solo founder and employee, I bootstrapped Prerender.io from zero to $2.5 million in ARR over 5 years!

My name is Laura Elizabeth and I run Client Portal. Client portal is a lightweight project management tool for WordPress.

But unlike most project management tools, it doesn’t try to do everything. It gives your clients a portal on your own website where they can access their project deliverables, see what’s coming up, and what’s been completed. It doesn’t impose any kind of process or unnecessary tools on you, it gives you the freedom to work how you want – while making you look great to your clients.

Initially Client Portal was created for freelancers and agencies. But over the last year or so, we've been getting many other types of customers like lawyers, real estate agents, marine biologists, travel agents, and more. Basically anyone who needs to share files with their client or customer can benefit from Client Portal.

Hi! I’m Josh and I created Wheely Sales, a lucky wheel popup that works on any e-commerce platform. It’s basically like the Wheel of Fortune from the classic TV game show - but fully customizable for your online store!

For a chance to win a prize or discount, visitors enter their email address and spin the wheel. Since it’s something fun and different for users, it has much higher opt-in rates (~12%) than regular exit popups. I also conform to the “eat your own dog food” premise and use Wheely Sales on its own landing page! :)

I’ve grown revenue from $0 to $600/month in just 4 months since getting started and over 1.1 million people have seen the wheel on my customers’ websites in that time.

We’re two people Nishant and Arnob who are friends from our school days (sat together on the same bench), and then ended up joining the same college (same bench again), where one became a designer, and the other, a developer.

We’ve just launched Olvy.

Hi team, my name is Gilbert and I’m the CEO at Leaf Grow, a simple, powerful automation and insights platform for Facebook Ads Network. We are driven by the promise to make paid-social seamless and effective at scale, empowering brands of all sizes to grow and make the most of their potential.

We have learned that paid social is a difficult beast to handle, but when done right, paid social can deliver amazing results to brands and companies regardless of their size. We got started in the music industry and found that the same basic principles that apply to promote and build audiences for musicians apply to brands and commerce alike; in the end, we are all competing in the same space for attention from the right people, at the right time.

Since we got started we have been growing double digits month on month, delivering material performance gains to businesses all around the world, helping not only increase their revenue but helping them approach growth in a more systematic and integrated form. Maybe we can say that in less than a year we are 20% short of breakeven? with a team of 15.

I didn’t “come up” with the idea; I was beaten in the face repeatedly with the idea until I finally recognized that it WAS an idea.

See, back in 2008 I was working as a freelance web developer and I built a little Mac app to automatically compile Less files into CSS when I saved them. (Before that, you had to compile them manually at the command line, like a godforsaken heathen.)

I put that app online for free, made a funny website for it, and it blew up. Millions of developers used it. One guy even tipped me $5 via PayPal, which means it was more profitable than Uber and Lyft combined.

I started getting freelance jobs as a front-end developer when I was studying, and in the next few years, I decided to do this full time. I worked for a few companies, big and small, building websites.

If you believe in something and focus all your time and efforts on it, be patient. Some things will work sooner, some others might work later on.

I was also passionate about building games, and in my spare time, I was experimenting to see if it's possible to build games using web technologies. This led me to finally deciding to quit my job and focus all the energy on running Enclave Games studio and organizing js13kGames competition.

My name is Tony Phillips and I’m the Chief Product Officer of Galvanize. I am working on all of our educational programs, including our Data Science Immersive bootcamp and our Software Engineering Immersive bootcamp.

The EDU team also includes a new addition: Tech Talent Pipeline. TTP is a new program sponsored by the city of New York where we are working with unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers to help them launch careers in data and marketing analysis.

Hello, I'm Cristian, I consider myself an entrepreneur and I’m from Barcelona. I created my first company in the year 2000, and now I work full-time in the third startup that I built and the one that is paying my bills. But a year ago I started a new side project: Fidlio.

Fidlio is a micro-SaaS. A software tool that allows other software companies to gather feedback and feature requests from their users. That helps them plan their roadmap and decide which features to build next, saving time and money.