Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Jason FriedJason FriedBorn 7 Apr 1974A profitable project-management product gave Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson room to run Basecamp without a growth-at-any-cost plan. The founders describe profits from the beginning and regular distributions to owners. Their practical example is a business whose paying customers support its…0
  2. 2Natalie NageleNatalie NageleAt Wildbit, Natalie and Chris Nagele treated profit as the condition for keeping a worthwhile workplace alive. Natalie has described healthy historical margins while also explaining why some profit needed reinvesting in products, salaries and people. That distinction makes her especially useful…0
  3. 3Giacomo GuilizzoniGiacomo GuilizzoniBalsamiq's founder offers unusually concrete evidence of a small software business balancing earnings and development. His 2013 review reported more than $6 million in revenue, profit margins around 30 per cent and a team of 16, alongside substantial work on the next generation of the wireframing…0
  4. 4Aytekin TankAytekin TankTank describes two early decisions made to keep Jotform profitable: moving the form-software business to Turkey and hiring only when he had a year's salary set aside. A paid version followed in 2007. This is a particularly practical example for a small-business owner because it connects a new…0
  5. 5Laura RoederLaura RoederMeetEdgar turned Roeder's social-media training experience into software that customers paid to use. In a founder interview, she described good profit margins and insisted on measuring actual customer cancellations rather than presenting a flattering number to investors. That makes the case more…0
  6. 6Nithin KamathNithin KamathBorn 5 Oct 1979Zerodha's early profitability helped Nithin and Nikhil Kamath build a brokerage without pressure to maximise account openings or trading activity at any cost. Its published principles reject advertising-driven acquisition and metric-based growth targets for staff. For an owner considering…0i
  7. 7Sridhar VembuSridhar VembuZoho describes a profitable private company that puts most of its investment into people and research and development. Vembu's case, with Tony Thomas and the wider team, is useful because profit is treated as a base for patient engineering rather than a reason to stop spending. The business can…0
  8. 8Nathan BarryNathan BarryBarry's account of building Kit separates recurring revenue from money the email-software business actually earns. He reports annual profit above $5 million and more than $10 million shared with the team. Those are the founder's published figures, rather than independent audited claims. For a small…0
  9. 9Joel GascoigneJoel GascoigneBorn 24 Mar 1987Buffer is a useful recovery case, not a story of uninterrupted profitability. After net losses in 2022 and 2023, the social-media software company returned to a modest profit in 2024 and reported net income of about $2.5 million in 2025. It resumed sharing profits with staff as the operating…0
  10. 10Chris SavageChris SavageSavage and Brendan Schwartz reset Wistia after an expansion strategy left the video-software company on course for a large loss in 2017. They used debt to buy out investors and refocused on a profitable, independent business, later reporting roughly $6 million in earnings before interest, tax,…0