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Ryan Petersen: Flexport, Founder Mode, and the Return of the Founder-CEO

Ryan Petersen founded Flexport in 2013. He stepped back in 2022. He returned in 2023 to steer the company through the freight downturn. Along the way, Paul Graham's Founder Mode essay used his story as the anchor.

Ryan Petersen

Flexport

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Our first 100 customers came from a single Google Doc

Founder Storybootstrap

5 min read·developer tools

Our first 100 customers came from a single Google Doc

We didn't have a product page. We had a public Google Doc with 84 footnotes. Here's how it became a distribution engine.

Marek JanowskiPondscale

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I almost shut down on the day we got our biggest break

Founder Storybootstrap

5 min read·solo founder

I almost shut down on the day we got our biggest break

Solo founder Nora Mancini was thirty seconds from sending a wind-down email to her four customers. Then her laptop chimed.

Nora ManciniAtlas Vault

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Bootstrapped to $1.8M ARR selling software to small law firms

Fast Trackvertical SaaS

6 min read·legal tech

Bootstrapped to $1.8M ARR selling software to small law firms

Small law firms were supposedly an impossible market. Three years and one painful pricing reset later, Casefile is profitable, growing, and unburdened by venture timelines.