AdBlock's Solo Developer Success
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A story about how two competing ad blocking Chrome extensions became massive businesses, with particular focus on AdBlock's founder Michael Gundlack.
"I got curious about Chrome extensions after talking to someone who had a $25M revenue extension with just 2 people. This led me to look into two extensions - AdBlock and AdBlock Plus.
AdBlock was created by one guy in Georgia named Michael Gundlack in 2009. He was the only employee the whole time. He's this really low-key guy - only 55 Twitter followers, has a personal website called sorry-robot.com with Python projects and even an MP3 of him singing a Christmas song at church. He previously worked at Google on ads and AdSense in 2005, then basically said 'nah, I hate these ads' and built AdBlock.
The interesting part is his competitor, AdBlock Plus, which is run by a European company called IO with 20-30 employees. Because they're based in Europe, they had to file public reports. In 2017 they did $44M in revenue and $26M in profit with over 100M users.
AdBlock itself had similar usage numbers - around 20M users. There's potential this one guy was making tens of millions in dollars per year in profit just off a Chrome extension. In 2015, an anonymous buyer reportedly bought AdBlock - could have been for $200-300M.
The wild part is he probably made around $30M from his time at Google if he held his stock, then potentially hundreds of millions more from AdBlock. All from this quiet guy in Duluth, Georgia who describes himself on LinkedIn simply as 'just a guy.'"
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.