DuckDuckGo's Solo Success
Share
A story about DuckDuckGo's founder Gabe's journey from solo founder to building a major privacy-focused search engine.
"For a large chunk of time, he was just a solo founder building a search engine to compete with Google. He was getting small bits of positive feedback from communities like Hacker News - they'd say DuckDuckGo is amazing for Stack Overflow searches or specific niche searches.
As he got good feedback from those groups, he'd invest in making the product a little better. After 12-14 years of working on this, not only has the product gotten much better, but the trend line of where big tech is going has made privacy much more of a concern for people.
DuckDuckGo has been one of the few companies that for over a decade has had privacy as a core value. They've built an incredibly complex product to compete with Google - it's not something you can spin up overnight or as a side hustle. Now they do north of $100 million in revenue."
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.