wouldit.work

Tag

#community case studies

3 sourced case studies tagged #community. Every number links inline to the page it came from; self-reported figures are labelled as such.

SaaS6 sources · 2 min

Excalidraw: a weekend side project, 135K GitHub stars, and a paid Excalidraw+ to fund it

Christopher Chedeau started a hand-drawn diagram tool on 1 January 2020. It went viral as open source, and the team later built Excalidraw+ so the free project could pay for itself.

open-sourcewhiteboarddiagrams
Developer tools3 sources · 2 min

Glitch: 1.8 million developers, a Fastly acquisition, and the end of app hosting

Glitch made it easy to build and remix small web apps in the browser. It raised $30M, shrank, sold to Fastly in 2022, and shut down project hosting in July 2025 as newer platforms caught up.

hostingremixcommunity
Consumer apps7 sources · 2 min

Nomad List: a crowdsourced spreadsheet that became a paid community for remote workers

Pieter Levels tested demand with a public Google Sheet before writing code, hit #1 on Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident, and turned the traffic into a paid membership.

solobuild-in-publicproduct-hunt

Other tags

#ai (16)#solo (12)#bootstrapped (11)#cautionary (11)#acquisition (10)#build-in-public (10)#saas (7)#pivot (6)#trustmrr (6)#venture-funded (6)#consumer (5)#open-source (5)#product-hunt (5)#shutdown (5)#vibe-coding (5)#viral (5)#agents (4)#api (4)#no-code (4)#platform-risk (4)#timing (4)#ads (3)#b2b (3)#freemium (3)#hacker-news (3)#hardware (3)#image-generation (3)#side-project (3)#api-costs (2)#browser (2)#cursor (2)#failure (2)#free-product (2)#game (2)#layoffs (2)#long-game (2)#mobile (2)#one-time-purchase (2)#privacy (2)#reddit (2)#scheduler (2)#seo (2)#social-media (2)#solo-founder (2)#text-to-speech (2)#viral-loop (2)#wrapper (2)