. Home of the first iterations of Gaps.com.
In an age of AI and marketing dictated by algorithms, I’m obsessed with which online businesses continue to thrive.
I spend countless hours each month going through earnings reports and funding rounds to find trends and discover success stories to help inspire your own journey.
The feedback continues to be incredible, and I truly appreciate everyone who has been sharing our work.
It does not go unnoticed.
I want to continue trying to be valuable, so let’s dive in…
This SaaS Company Behind Some Incredible Domains Grew Monthly Revenue 9.4% to $7.1M
If you follow me on X or LinkedIn (please say “Hi”) then you may recall a few months ago that I shared the story of Text Group, owners of some incredible domain names.
Some of the brands they’re behind, and the numbers from when I last reported on them, were:
HelpDesk.com: 1,224 paying customers ($191 ARPU)
ChatBot.com: 2,962 paying customers ($148 ARPU)
LiveChat.com: 36,435 paying customers ($173 ARPU)
Now you hopefully see why I call them incredible. I think they’re one of the most fascinating companies to follow.
Text uses ARPL in their updates (Average Revenue Per License) but I used ARPU above (U = User) as it’s more common.
In their investor update they revealed payments for the quarter of $21.4M, a 0.4% increase year-over-year.
The quarter also saw a net decrease of 907 customers for LiveChat.com, but this was offset by generating more revenue per user.
An AI-Powered SQL Query Builder Just Surpassed $10,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue
There are probably a lot of developers who thought about building something like this, but Mustafa Ergisi acted on the idea in style.
Mustafa created AI2Sql.io, which lets you use natural language to write SQL queries that can interact with databases.
The tool can write queries, explain what it wrote, and also improve existing queries you may already use.
The revenue update comes almost a year after Mustafa shared that he had hit $5,000 in MRR, so he effectively doubled his revenue in 2024.
If correct, the numbers on the site are a little surprising, as it states that 50,000 users have generated just 75,000 queries. I guess most people test it for a single query and never return.
Without knowing anything about the tool, I am going to guess that standard ChatGPT could handle the majority of use cases, but as I haven’t dived in, I shouldn’t make too many assumptions.
Well done, Mustafa!
He Lost His Job, Then Built a Newsletter About Video Games Which Generated ~$100,000 in Its First Year
If you enjoy reading about video games, you’re probably already familiar with the writing of Stephen Totilo.
He was the Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku for nine years before moving to write for Axios, which he was later laid off from.
Spurred on by the idea of having more control over his future, Game File was born.
In a round-up of the first year since launching the newsletter, he said.
Game File currently has just under 1,079 paid subs. (If you’re doing the math on revenue, bear in mind that Substack takes 10% and payment processor Stripe takes 3%, and I have many more personal expenses than I would if I had a traditional employer).
At $100-$120/yr per subscriber (paying annually vs paying monthly) we can assume he generated around $100,000 on the low-end of estimations before any of the aforementioned costs.
Stephen was definitely helped by having a large audience from his previous writing, but that was something he worked hard to build over a very long period. I don’t think there’s much luck in this equation, if any at all.
The Company Behind RankMath and WP Rocket Generated Over €350M Last Year (And Just Acquired Website Speed Tool, GTMetrix)
If you’ve ever built a website with WordPress, you’ve likely heard of plugins like WP Rocket (site speed) and RankMath (SEO), even if you don’t use them yourself.
The company behind those brands and many more, group.one, recently announced their acquisition of the website speed testing tool GTMetrix. Group.one acquired WPRocket (via WP Media) in 2021 and RankMath in May of 2023.
I couldn’t find any numbers as part of the acquisition (besides that group.one now serves over 2 million customers), but I can tell you Similarweb estimates they reach about 800,000 monthly visitors.
Between that and Pingdom, it’s one of the most common tools I’ve seen people recommend to help you figure out what the bottlenecks might be when it comes to the speed of your website. I’ve personally used it on at least 100 websites.
As of writing, group.one (they write their name lowercase) has over 1,500 employees and generated “over €350M” for the financial year ending September 2024.
Entrepreneur Iron Brands Generated $500,000+ in 2024 Thanks to These Two Saas Products (Without Funding)
I’ve been a mutual follower of Iron Brands for quite a while now so it’s nice to finally cover him in one of these reports.
His yearly roundup revealed that his two SaaS products grew massively in 2024. They were:
- Simple Analytics: $427K ARR (+30% YoY)
- UniHosted: $78K ARR (+1,200% YoY)
If you weren’t familiar with Iron previously, you might have still seen Uni Hosted in our web hosting startups report.
His projects are self-funded, making the numbers just that bit more impressive.
Teal Just Raised $7.5M in a Niche I’m Very Interested in from an SEO Perspective: Resume Builders & Templates
I keep two lists when I’m writing these reports on Gaps: A list of what I think is worth covering right now and a list of what I believe will be worth tracking if more similar success stories emerge.
Teal fits into both categories, as I’ve been very interested in the ‘resume’ space from both a business and SEO perspective over the past year.
I know of multiple independent websites picking up millions of monthly visitors from Google with the sole focus of helping people build out their resumes and CVs.
When you take a look at the type of search volumes some of the most broad terms get, you can quickly see how that’s possible:
Teal’s $7.5M in Series A funding, bringing their total funding amount to $19M, should certainly help with their marketing efforts in search and beyond.
They’re also not just a resume builder tool, so will likely look to expand upon that diversification.
This SaaS for Collecting Reviews On Your Website Just Surpassed $10M in ARR With a Single, $15/m Payment Plan
Peter-Jan Celis, founder and chairman of Judge.me, recently revealed the platform has turned ten years old and crossed the $10M in annual recurring revenue mark.
What’s so interesting about this app for Shopify stores is that it has a single pricing plan: Just $15/m to get all features on your store.
Combined with their free plan, over 475,000 stores currently use one of their three apps.
Some quick maths suggests they have somewhere in the region of around 55,000 stores paying for their premium offering.
Judge.me has no investors and initially went years without even having their own website. Instead, they relied on the Shopify App Store to promote their product.
This Sock eCommerce Brand Generated $24M in 2024 And Is Aiming for $50M+ in 2025
In January, entrepreneur Zach Stuck revealed that Hollow, a performance alpaca sock brand, generated $24M in 2024.
There was likely a large advertising budget to help make that happen, but it’s still impressive.
Hollow’s socks are marketed as helping keep your feet warm and dry, with their unique feature being that they’re made with a percentage of “premium Peruvian baby alpaca fiber”.
Some socks use 70% of the fiber while others use less, with nylon and spandex typically making up the rest.
With some incredible testimonials in the media and over 241,000 customers (as stated on their website), they’ve clearly found product-market fit.
Noah Shreve Generated $243,000 in the First Year of His Online Design Studio, Orange Studio
In December’s income report I shared a revenue update from Chris Halaska, a designer who generated $160,000 in a single month.
I received some great feedback from people who run their own online design services so when I saw Noah Shreve sharing his numbers, I knew I had to cover those as well.
Noah revealed some specific stats from OrangeStudio for 2024:
- $243,000 in total revenue
- 11 individual clients:
- 7 subscription
- 3 year-long
- 1 unknown (I’m writing this, not Noah)
- Best month: October ($32,000)
- Worst month: May ($9,600)
Like Chris, Noah’s studio website is incredibly clean and exactly my kind of aesthetic.
It obviously helps that he has the skills to back up his results, with some truly beautiful designs in his portfolio.
With $426,000 Invested, This SEO Content SaaS Generated $17,600 in MRR Last Month
If you’ve been in the SEO space for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of Nathan Gotch.
Nathan has been sharing advice on the topic for over a decade, and last year he launched a SaaS product to the audience he’s built up.
That product is Rankability.
As you can see from the screenshot, Rankability takes an SEO-first approach to creating content, allowing you to dial in things like the use of keywords and the search intent (and search volume) behind them.
It’s not the first of its kind, but there’s always room to put your own spin on things.
What I love about Nathan’s story is that he openly shares how much he has invested in the software so far.
Most recent numbers show he’s generated $87,296 in revenue while spending $426,111 of his own money to build the platform. That leaves him with about $338,000 needed to break even (not accounting for future costs).
I assume that most of the significant expenses are covered for now (only 7% of spend was for external APIs) and he’ll quickly claw those numbers back.
MarketWise, the Financial Research Platform, Now Has 500,000+ Paid Subscribers And Generated $55M in Q4
You might not be familiar with the name Marketwise, but if you’re an active investor you might be familiar with some of their brands, such as Brownstone Research, InvestorPlace and Stansberry Research.
The latter claims to have more than one million people subscribed to their newsletter, which then promotes their own investment advisory with a sales page reminiscent of what you might remember from the Clickbank days.
It must be working well, as the $499 annual offer is just one which has helped Marketwise grow to over half a million paying subscribers. They also noted that they have over 3.3M free subscribers on their various channels.
Despite the impressive number of paid subscribers, it’s a significant drop from the 592,000 they had at the end of Q3.
As with any public company I follow, there’s much more to their business than I can cover here, so please do your own research before considering any investments.
Eve Just Raised $47M for Its Legal AI Platform, But It’s Their Revenue Growth That Caught My Attention
Eve dubs itself as “the only legal AI that works the whole case with you.”
The AI-first platform helps law firms draft demand letters, manage discovery and handle case intake.
While announcing (paywall) their $47M Series A, Fortune noted that their revenue has grown 5X in just the past eight months.
If you head on over to our Legal Startups Report you’ll see they’re far from the only company promoting AI as a way to make lawyer’s lives easier. In reality, we’re probably just at the beginning of a wave of more to come.
With $2.99M in 2024 Revenue, Zenmaid is Yet Another SaaS Startup Following A Business Model I Love
This is now the third monthly income report where I’m covering a business model I almost can’t stop thinking about: Creating the ultimate customer management and booking platform for a very specific type of business.
Thanks to Amar Ghose sharing his numbers for ZenMaid, we now know the SaaS for helping people run their maid service generated $2.99M in 2024.
That’s a 22% increase on the $2.45M he generated in 2023.
That’s not all.
We also learned about Lupa this month, which raised a $4M seed round to help people manage all aspects of their pet care business.
The table is growing…
| Startup | Simple Description | Recent Numbers |
| Helps people with pet businesses manage their operations | $4M Seed Round | |
 ZenMaid |
Helps companies run their cleaning business | $2.99M 2024 revenue |
 bsport |
Helps boutique studios manage their daily operations | €30M Series B |
 JobNimbus |
Helps roofing business owners and contractors run operations | $330M growth investment |
 Mangomint |
Helps salons and spas manage their daily operations | $35M Series B |
 Semble |
Helps healthcare companies manage their practice | $15.3M Series B |
 Archy |
Helps power your entire dental practice | $15M Series A |
If I started actively looking to grow this list, it would include dozens if not hundreds of companies. For now, I like to add to the list as the news comes up about new entrants, funding rounds or revenue numbers.
Daash Raises $5.5M to Show Trending Beauty Products Online (Confirming a Trend I Think Will Come to Other Industries)
San Francisco-based Daash confirmed a $5.5M funding round in January, bringing their total funding to $8.25M.
As soon as I clicked on their website it felt remarkably familiar: Their focus on tracking the sales and trending products from other stores is similar to Eyva.ai which I covered in December’s report (Insight #23).
In that update I said,
They’ve essentially taken what you can find on broader, eCommerce-focused research platforms (pricing, new product launches, etc.) and focused on a single, popular niche. [..] I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I’m reporting on other companies doing something similar for the sports niche, furniture space, fashion industry and more.
That’s not to say Daash copied Eyva, of course, but we’re starting to get the hallmarks of a trend building up here.
Backed by Y Combinator, This Platform for AI Agents Hit $50K in MRR in Its First Three Months
Finn Mallery, founder of Origami Agents, took to social media in January to share how he has grown his platform for AI agents to over $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
He actually reached $10,000 in MRR in their first month, then continued to grow quickly.
Origami Agents help you automate all your go-to-market research to find the perfect customers who might be interested in your products.
According to Finn when discussing how they grew so fast, “the only channel we used was cold email” and “we sent 50-75 highly targeted cold emails a day.”
As I was about to hit Publish on this report I noticed Finn set his X profile to private, so I don’t want to quote anything that’s no longer public. I’ll update this if there’s anything questionable about the above.
With Over 3,000 Customers and $350,000 in Annual Revenue, Beautifully Simple ImprovMX Has Been Acquired
Entrepreneur Antoine Minoux revealed in January that he had sold his “email forwarding as a service” startup, ImprovMX.
In seven years he took his $5,000 investment in the company and built it to around $30,000 in monthly revenue, all while working a 9-5 job.
In simple terms, ImprovMX allows you to send and receive emails to a custom email address, so you could use @gaps.com – rather than @gmail.com – even if there wasn’t a website published there.
In his update, Antoine reflected that things weren’t always easy, as one slight issue when sending millions of emails per day can stack up quickly.
He said the key to monetising the tool’s popularity was “to add friction on the free plan, but not too much” whereby they might risk losing users to similar offerings.
To my knowledge, no deal terms were disclosed, but it’s great to have some insights into how much the business generated each month before that.
Gumloop Raised a $17M Series A to Help You Automate Any Workflow with AI
Led by NexusVP with participation from First Round and Y Combinator, Gumloop has now raised a total of $20M for their AI automation framework.
Interestingly, they raised the funding while technically being just a team of two (they had two interns and two contractors at the time).
Gumloop describes itself as a no-code platform to let anyone build automations, powered by AI.
As a specific example, you might use Gumloop to turn a YouTube video into a blog post, translate it into any language, then automatically publish it to your CMS.
With their drag-and-drop workflow builder you can combine lots of different services to automate your typical processes.
Gfinity, Behind a Network of Content Sites for Gamers, Generated £1.9M in 2024
Gfinity chairman Neville Upton admitted 2024 was a challenging year for the company as it completed the exit of one line of business to focus on being a “pure play digital media company”.
Gfinity generated £1.9M for the financial year ending 30th June 2024 (these accounts were only revealed in January of 2025, which is why I’m sharing them now).
That’s a 14% decrease year over year, and resulted in a loss of £594,000 (~$794,000 USD).
The content site business model has not been without struggles, of which Gfinity is behind brands like:
Gfinity eSports (eSports news)
MTG Rocks (Magic the Gathering news)
RacingGames.gg (racing game news)Starfield Portal (Starfield news and guides)
Across their network of sites they recorded 97.9M sessions, down from 180M sessions in the prior year.
As two explanations for the 45% drop, they noted gamers preferring to use platforms like Twitch and “the algorithm at Google affecting smaller publishers”.
The latter point has been a hot topic in SEO circles for more than 18 months now.
Similarweb Released Their List of the 100 Fastest-Growing Websites for 2024, And I Went Through Each One to Find the Most Interesting
For the second year, I’ve gone through every business on Similarweb’s fastest-growing companies list to see which are the most interesting.
I don’t have a set number in mind when doing this; I just want to find cool companies.
The kind of companies I don’t find interesting on their list include Ralph Lauren, UNIQLO and The Associated Press.
Instead, I want to find newer businesses doing something a bit different, so here are eleven of my favourites:
| Site | Simplified Description | YoY % Growth | Niche |
| Talk or text with experts on any topic (legal, pets, etc.) | 81% | Multiple | |
 Amberjack |
eCommerce & retail brand that has “reinvented dress shoes” | 140% | Fashion |
 Prose |
AI-powered haircare & skincare formulated just for you | 105% | Skincare |
 Ritual Zero Proof |
Cocktails…without alcohol. Available in sets or a monthly subscription | 188% | Food & Drink |
 Boarderie |
Artisan cheese & charcuterie boards shipped overnight (actually super cool) | 93% | Food & Drink |
 Backyard Discovery |
eCom store for any backyard item you can think of (swings, gazebos, etc.) | 119% | Home |
 The Cool Down |
A content site with news & guides on helping the planet | 156% | News |
 Monarch Money |
SaaS website & app to help you manage your finances in one place | 543% | Finance |
 Ownwell |
Online service that helps you save money on property taxes (surprisingly interesting) | 251% | Finance |
| Travel site that only lets you book with points from airlines and credit cards | 137% | Travel | |
 Disturbia.us |
Fashion store just for gothic and grunge items. Interesting niche. | 154% | Fashion |
You can go to Similarweb to download the complete list. I have no association with them — I just appreciate the effort they put into this each year.
Raising $8M, Botika’s AI Models are Already Being Used on Thousands of Online Fashion Stores
When AI-generated images started to become more realistic, it was thought that graphic designers, photographers and models across the globe might bear some negative impact.
On the back of $8M in seed funding, Botika is yet another AI-generated image tool which could potentially add to their challenges in finding work.
To clarify, this is not a complaint and I’m not in either of those positions, but I see it as a reality of where certain creative work is heading. Others, of course, will see AI as a way to improve what they’re already doing.
According to their data, Botika’s AI fashion models have helped stores improve conversion rates, average order value and click-through rates on their ads.
As long as customers aren’t distracted by the unnatural nature of AI-generated images (which will likely reduce in time), it seems inevitable that more companies will use tools like these.
After all, you get to put your clothes on countless models in countless poses and limitless locations for a minuscule cost compared to the real thing.
Fibery, A Notion & Trello Competitor, Doubled Their Number of Paying Customers in 2024
If you’re a member of SEO Blueprint (doors closed, so not a pitch) you may have seen us cover the Notion-Trello-hybrid SaaS startup, Fibery.
In their 2024 year-end roundup they revealed they added 280 new customers in 2024, bringing their current total to 530.
Unfortunately I don’t have any revenue numbers for Fibery which kind of breaks my rule for covering them in a report, but they go so deep into their wins and losses that I think they’re the perfect startup to cover.
They shared things like:
- They fixed 1,400 bugs throughout the year
- Having to let go of their Head of Marketing and a Product Manager
- Struggles with migrating their payment platform
- Paid influencer marketing didn’t work out for them
- They believe they’ve now nailed the positioning of their pricing plans
They also revealed that giving users access to all premium features during their paid trial “boosted new paid accounts by a significant margin”.
Remember the Trend of Startups Helping People Get Paid by AI Companies? Now We Have a $10M Niche Version of That
In our November 2024 income report I introduced three companies that had all just received funding to help you license your content to AI companies.
Those companies were:
Troveo: $4.5M in funding from Reddit and Zynga founders
Prorata.ai: Raised $25M then received additional investment from the Daily Mail owners
TollBit: Raised $25M
Well, we now have a niche version of that business model.
Created by Humans announced $5M in seed funding in January, in addition to their $5M pre-seed, to help book authors get compensated for their work.
The benefit to working with any of these companies is that alone, it’s hard to even get in contact with AI companies in any meaningful way, never mind getting paid by them.
Working with one company with a pool of content to share – which you can get a cut of the proceeds from then selling – should give you a much better chance of getting something.
Whether companies like these should be required in the first place is a topic in itself (a lot of data has been taken without permission), but we should have a clearer picture when we get the results of legal battles currently playing out.
Email Marketing Personalisation SaaS Right Message Grew MRR to $23,142 Last Month
Brennan Dunn, someone I’ve connected with a few times over the years, revealed in January that RightMessage grew monthly revenue by 11% to $23,142.
At the time it was shared, the company had 202 customers.
I feel like I’ve known about RightMessage for at least a decade thanks to another friend, Pat Flynn (now an absolute goliath in the Pokemon space), using their software prominently on his website.
Simply put, RightMessage allows you to tag and segment email subscribers by having them self-identify their interests through quizzes and surveys. (There’s more to it than that, but that’s definitely one of the main selling points).
The idea is that you can send the “right message” to the right person based on what you now know about them.
For instance, sending SaaS owners revenue updates from other SaaS companies is better than emailing them about local news success stories.
That sounds obvious, but if you aren’t segmenting your email list, that’s the exact kind of targeting mismatch people can fall into.
Campspot.com Generated $81.1M for Campgrounds in 2024, Facilitating 3.4M Reservations Through Their Platform
I’ve never used Campspot but I really like their business model.
Holidaymakers get to find the best spots for camping, glamping or staying in an RV, and the people who operate campgrounds can use their software to manage the bookings.
Similarweb estimates just 18% of their traffic is sent via search engines — a number I expected to be quite a bit higher when you consider all of the “[location] resort” terms they’re ranking for.
Referrals (likely from affiliates) and direct traffic make up most of their visitors.
Some of the most interesting stats from their 2024 wrap-up included:
- Driving 106,000 first-time customers to campgrounds
- They had 9M sessions on their campsite marketplace
- They’ve hit 342,000 app downloads
- There are 315,000 campsites listed on their platform
The vast majority of campers used RVs (77%), followed by lodging (13%), tents (7%) and other (3%).
With Marketing Online Dominated by Compelling Images and Videos, Air Raise $35M to Help Businesses Manage Those Creative Assets
When announcing their $35M Series B, Air co-founder Shane Hegde said he described the platform to his mother as “it’s like Dropbox for your content.”
Air helps teams take their design assets from platforms like Box and Google Drive and organise them in one place.
It then adds an additional layer where assets can be shared with the right people, receive comments and get approved to go live.
With online marketing dominated by the images and videos companies share on social media, Air has spent seven years working in a space I think will only get bigger.
I really like this “additional layer” angle, where you take processes businesses are already involved in and make the management of them much easier. It’s similar to TypingMind from our November report (direct link to insight) which added user management and usage stats on top of Large-Language Models.
Finally, if anyone from Air is reading this, just a heads up that your website doesn’t have a favicon, which stands out a little more because of the industry you’re in.
Victorian Plumbing, the UK’s Online Bathroom Specialist, Grew Revenue 4% to $295.7M in 2024
What I find most interesting about Victorian Plumbing is that they’re essentially a niche-focused goliath that has benefited from the online shopping boom of the last decade.
Focused on the UK market, they grew revenue by 4% and gross profit by 10% for the year ending 30th September 2024. These accounts were only released on the 15th of January 2025, which is why I’m reporting on them now.
Their revenue decreased if we don’t count their recent acquisition of Victoria Plum (a very similarly-named competitor).
As with any public company, there’s a lot more to their finances than I can report here, so please do your research before you consider investing.
I’m always interested in how companies so reliant on the internet are doing from an SEO perspective, which is one of the reasons I track them on our public stock page.
According to Ahrefs, on the surface they appear to have had a rough few years in search results but might be turning things back around now in 2025:
Of course, it’s not their only source of website traffic, but Similarweb estimates search accounts for around 30% of the 2.9 million monthly visits to their website.
As with any search traffic charts I share, always consider third-party data isn’t perfect, and any lost rankings / traffic may not have been relevant to their business.
Bootstrapped VWO.com Has Been Acquired for $200M After Generating $36.4M in 2024
It was a nice surprise to see VWO covered throughout tech news sites as I worked with them in a tiny capacity many years ago to give some advice on their SEO.
Of course, I had absolutely no part in their success — it’s just super cool for me to report on them getting such a massive exit.
Technically, it was their parent company, Wingify, which was acquired for $200M by private equity firm Everstone. VWO is the flagship product most people will know from them.
VWO is primarily an A/B testing tool, so you can test variations of different website elements to see which converts better.
According to a report on their numbers, Wingify had:
- $36.4M revenue for FY 2024
- $7.47M in profit for the same period
- 429 employees (up 25% year over year)
The exit has to be one of the biggest anywhere for an independent, bootstrapped founder. Well done, Paras and team.
Boardy Raised Another $8M for the Second Most Interesting AI Use Case Across the Entirety of Gaps.com
In our December income report I introduced Retellio (insight #21), which probably had the most interesting AI use case I’ve seen yet: They take all the calls a company receives, takes the highlights and then turns them into a weekly podcast for its CEO.
Boardy is now a close second to the title of “most interesting AI use case”, raising $8M to help introduce you to all the people it knows who might be great to connect with.
That’s right, Boardy will call you to learn about everything you have going on, then try to connect you with other people it has talked to that are most relevant.
As a simple example, someone seeking funding might be introduced to someone who invests in the same industry.
Founder Andrew D’Souza says the company has now made over 10,000 calls and that Boardy itself raised funding after investors used the product and saw the potential of the service.
Seline.so, A Privacy-Focused Analytics SaaS, Celebrates Hitting $500/M After Six Months
I get great feedback from sharing more “relatable” success stories and while that’s not why I’m sharing Seline, I hope it inspires people reading this who might just be starting out.
Kostya Nesterovich revealed that six months after launching the website and product analytics tool they had surpassed $500/M in monthly recurring revenue.
The screenshot accompanying the announcement shows they’ve passed $600/M already, and I hope things continue to grow.
I already use another privacy-focused analytics tool here on Gaps, otherwise I would give either Seline or Simple Analytics my business.
HR SaaS Employment Hero Was Just Acquired for An Estimated $107M
BetaKit’s Alex Riehl had the scoop that Australian human resources Saas, Employment Hero was acquired by Humi for $155M CAD (~$107.4M USD).
Humi themselves confirmed the deal was worth north of $100M, but Betakit sources revealed a more specific amount.
Employment Hero aims to help with payroll, application tracking, employee development and anything else HR teams might need to perform their jobs better.
Since its founding in 2016 they’ve raised $36M (CAD). They’ll now join a company that more than 150,000 Canadian workers use.
If you’re interested in more startups in the space, we have an HR report on exactly that.
LadBibleGroup, Which Continues to Dominate Social Media, Expect to Report 2024 Revenue of £86.2M (Up 22% Year Over Year)
I’ve reported on Lad Bible Group for our sister site a few times over the years. Any company with a successful network of content sites, no matter how they promote them, is always something I’ll try to stay current on.
The site you’re most likely to be familiar with is LadBible.com, which focuses on covering entertainment news and trending content. The brand currently has more than 61M followers on Facebook alone.
Other brands in their network include:
GAMINGbible – Mainstream gaming news
FOODbible – Fun, affordable food takesSPORTbible – Popular stories in the world of sport
UNILAD – News, videos and viral stories
UNILAD Tech – Gadgets, science and AI news
Of their 22% unaudited revenue growth, 6% happened organically while the rest can be attributed to the female-focused media brand they acquired for $24M, Betches.
The group also revealed that their global audience grew 19% year-over-year to 503 million, though it was noted that Facebook changes resulted in lower indirect revenues.
They expect revenue to increase by approximately 10% in 2025.
Bolt.new Reached $1.6M MRR in Just Two Months and Has Now Announced a $105.5M Series B Round
If you spend any time on social media you’ve likely been inundated with updates on what people have been creating with the AI platform Bolt (sign-up required).
Bolt allows you to input a prompt to generate the code for any application, web or otherwise, you can think of.
There can’t be many other companies that have reached the equivalent of 7 figures in recurring revenue so quickly.
In their funding announcement, Bolt CEO Eric Simons detailed how the journey hadn’t been easy, as they originally built a technology called ‘WebContainers’ they couldn’t initially find product market fit for.
It’s that same WebContainers “micro-OS” (their words) that powers a lot of what makes Bolt functionality so user-friendly today.
Powered by AI, TalentMapper is Generating £700,000 in Annual Revenue Helping Companies Assign Employees to The Best Projects
TalentMapper entered my radar by raising £2M in January, but it was reports of their £700,000 ($867,000 USD) in annual recurring revenue which really caught my attention.
TalentMapper helps companies with a large workforce and numerous projects assign tasks to people with the most relevant skills.
The aim is to help get projects moving faster and for employees to find opportunities in the company which they’re excited to tackle (and feel like they’re a good fit for).
According to TalentMapper – which is already being used by food conglomerate Danone – their AI has been trained on over 675 million career histories.
Guidejar, a SaaS for Interactive Product Demos, Hits $3,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue
Entrepreneur Shri Vatz revealed in January that his AI-powered product demo software, Guidejar, is making progress on his mission to hit $10,000 in MRR.
If you’ve ever signed up for software online and been ‘guided’ around the platform with tips and prompts that appear on screen, Guidejar can help generate those.
In addition to these “pop-ups” for new users, the tool offers AI translations, AI voiceovers and more personalised product tours by using conditional branching and dynamic variables, depending on who is using the site.
Vatz initially launched Guidejar on AppSumo and at one point turned down a $75,000 acquisition offer while it was generating $300/m, believing in the future of what he was creating.
Borderless Gets a $5M Boost for their AI Agent for HR, Perfectly Named HRGPT
Borderless isn’t the only company branding their offering as ‘HRGPT’ but new funding might help cement their association with the term.
With their AI-powered solutions for HR and legal professionals, they’re operating in a proven market where we’ve already reported on other companies using AI in the industry.
Examples of cases in which AI can help users include creating employment contracts tailored to someone’s location and sharing the legal process for terminating contractors.
Employees can also use Borderless to see things like how many remaining vacation days they have.
If my understanding is correct, AI is an add-on to a full suite of HR solutions rather than the entire focus of their business.
Here’s How Much Profit Buffer Generated on Up to $20M in Revenue for 2024
$202,459.
If you’ve read our last few reports you will have likely seen me cover the social media scheduling tool Buffer, which grew to $19M and then $20M in annual recurring revenue recently.
Founder Joel Gascoigne shared that the company made $202,459 in profit for 2024, after multiple years of losses.
As you can imagine there has been a mixed reaction to this.
Some have cheered Buffer on for being so transparent and at the end of the day, profit is profit. Running a business is hard.
Others have questioned whether they need 73 people on their team and why the company’s average salary is so high.
When asked about exactly that, Joel said,
What makes it high? We serve over 60,000 paying customers so that works out over 800 customers per team member. We’ve gradually shrunk the team (natural departures, not layoffs) over the past 5 years or so from 90 down to 73 and I think we’re at the sweet spot currently.
Logically speaking, there probably are optimisations in processes and tools that could help reduce expenses. That said, Joel has been working on this business for a decade, spent millions buying out prior investors, and knows the entire operation inside out.
I imagine his focus has been far more on reversing revenue declines, and now he’ll look at increasing those profit numbers.
In One of the Most Saturated Niches Online, Alia Surpassed $1M in ARR in Just One Year
The software: Pop-ups for eCommerce stores.
The company: Alia.
Proof of saturation: There are 326 apps on the Shopify App Store alone with pop-up functionality, and the idea has been around so long I built a successful business doing the same thing more than 10 years ago.
That didn’t stop Shaan Arora and his team however, who states his business has now surpassed the “magical” $83,333/m mark, which is what it takes to hit a $1M ARR run rate.
I won’t claim to know the features of every Shopify pop-up app and whether this is unique to Alia, but they do something special.
To get a discount on a product, there’s the option to make visitors go through what is essentially a form showing all of its features across multiple pages of insights.
In other words, once someone tries to get a discount, they’re first given a ton of additional information on why this is the product for them, likely increasing the chances they’ll buy it and use the discount code.
With some fast-growing eCommerce brands on board like Hostage Tape and BRĒZ, it must be converting well.
ReelFarm Hits $8,920 in MRR in Just 31 Days and Is Now the Third Similar Business We’ve Documented
There’s an obvious trend I don’t feel smart for noticing: People are crushing it with AI video-generation tools for platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
The latest addition to our list is ReelFarm, from Matt Welter, which offers the ability to “automate Tiktoks that drive traffic to your website.”
In our November income report I covered StoryShort AI, which has quickly passed the $10,000 (then $14,000) monthly recurring revenue mark.
In that write-up I noted I’m not the target audience for these kind of videos, but I know there’s a large one. That sentiment follows me here as well.
In December I introduced Sekai, which had raised $3.1M to create animated videos for social media on the topic of your choice.
There are a ton of other tools doing well in this space, but I prefer to report on them as I get the latest news rather than “going back” to seek them out.
Pricing for ReelFarm starts at $19/m, which lets you generate 10 videos, and goes up to $95/m, where you can generate 150 videos and create your own AI avatars.
I Stuck to My Promise of 38 Insights, But Here’s Four More (Free) for Gaps Readers
Each month, just for Gaps newsletter subscribers (it’s free), I share additional insights on things like:
- The domain changes big brands have made (very common after funding)
- Revenue updates for companies we’ve covered in the past
- Trending startups and their % growth over the past month
I also try and share additional revenue and funding insights where I can.
I don’t want to hype this up too much, but I will say I didn’t write 6,500+ words for free in the open, just to end this report with a boring bonus section.
The right way to approach this is that I want people to actively look forward to this bonus section each month.
I Want to Build Gaps Into 1% of the Size of The Financial Times, and Would Love Your Help to Get There (+ Links to Discuss This Report)
It’s my dream to be able to write and share these reports every month, but as a team of three we don’t have a ton of time to market them.
There’s still a ton of features we have in development that I can’t wait to share which are taking up a lot of my time at the moment.
I might be totally wrong, but I think if we truly care about making these reports insightful, we’ll have people who want to read them. Hopefully it shows how much effort goes into these, but I actually feel very lucky to have the chance to write them.
If you found any value in this at all, sharing it on social media would be sincerely appreciated. Here are direct links to discuss this report on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Facebook.
And if you’re not the sharing type, you can DM me with feedback via those same links.
Or even better, reply to the first email when you subscribe to our email list below (hey, if you don’t ask and all that…).
Thank you so much for giving me a chance with this new venture.
– Glen Allsopp
P.S. Here are the links again to discuss the report on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Facebook.
