30 Software Developer Success Stories [2023]
A software developer is a person who creates computer programs. They design, test, and oversee the creation of software for a variety of purposes including businesses, personal use, or social networking.
If you have strong technical skills and experience in programming, you can start a software development business. You should also have a good understanding of how the software works.
The average salary for software developers is $110,140. The best-paid 25 percent earn an annual income of up to 140K dollars while the lowest-paid workers make just under 84K dollars.
The recent trends in software development are moving towards mobile apps and cloud-based solutions. Businesses are providing a variety of programming languages and tools to create software that meets the client's needs.
Starting a software development company is the perfect way to explore in this exciting industry. This type of business is growing in popularity as businesses are looking for ways to offer their customers a convenient way to access their data and applications.
Here are some real life success stories of starting a software developer:
1. SkyVerge, Inc. ($4.2M/year)
Max Rice (from Remote, Oregon, USA) started SkyVerge, Inc. over 10 years ago.
Hi all, my name is Max Rice, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of SkyVerge, where we build software tools that help over 100,000 eCommerce brands manage and grow their online stores. Our customers are mostly small to medium-sized businesses in all kinds of verticals.
My co-founder Justin Stern and I started SkyVerge in 2013 and we’re a globally distributed team of over 30 people, with revenue of $350,000 per month.
2. UserGuiding ($1.68M/year)
Osman Koc (from Istanbul, Turkey) started UserGuiding over 5 years ago.
Hi, my name is Osman, I'm the co-founder of UserGuiding. UserGuiding is a SaaS product that helps web applications show their value propositions by enabling them to improve their ease of use. Interactive product tours, which can be created without coding, help product managers, marketers, and UX designers to make changes to the interfaces of their platforms. Personalized guides, built-in minutes, decrease the customer support workload by accelerating the onboarding process.
Today, we have +5,000 sign-ups from 92 countries. And there are more than 4 million end users onboard with UserGuiding. Over the past 14 months, we have grown by 20% + per month. The number of active subscribers increased from 5 to 73, and our monthly recurring revenue increased from $413 to $9,400.
Learn more about starting a software developer:
Where to start?
-> Software developer plan
-> How to finance a software developer?
-> How much does it cost to start a software developer?
-> Pros and cons of a software developer
-> How to get clients for a software developer?
Need inspiration?
-> Examples of established software developer
-> Marketing ideas for a software developer
-> Software developer slogans
-> Software developer names
-> Software developer Instagram captions
Other resources
-> Profitability of a software developer
-> Software developer tips
-> Software developer hashtags
4. Epixel Solutions ($1.8M/year)
Sajin Rajan (from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA) started Epixel Solutions about 8 years ago.
Hi, this is Sajin Rajan, co-founder of Epixel Solutions, LLC. With at most satisfaction, I’m happy to share my story with you. When I launched our flagship product, Epixel MLM Software in the global market back in 2015, our motto was to create a revolution.
After a year of Epixel’s establishment, we managed to make an annual income of $10,000. At present, we’re making a monthly revenue of about $70,000, this value remarks our growth. Our effort never went vein and we’re proud to excel in our business.
5. Treblle ($60K/year)
Vedran Cindric (from Zagreb, Croatia) started Treblle over 2 years ago.
My name is Vedran, I'm 33 years old and I've been a developer for the past 15 years. I started out with back-end development in PHP/MYSQL and progressed to learning HTML/CSS/JS as well as DevOps. I love writing great, efficient, and optimized code. Before starting our current startup, Treblle, I ran a development company for the past 10 years with clients all around the world.
With our development company, we completed over 100 projects and launched multiple products and startups for others. We managed to raise 1,4 million dollars in a Seed investment round led by Nauta Capital and at the moment we are serving more than 200 customers and growing daily. Considering we haven’t officially launched we are very happy with the results so far.
6. Barn2 Plugins ($1.44M/year)
Katie Keith (from Plymouth, UK) started Barn2 Plugins over 7 years ago.
Hi, I’m Katie from Barn2 Plugins. We sell innovative software products which add extra features to websites that are built on the popular WordPress and WooCommerce platforms.
We now have 16 products that generate over $100,000 in monthly revenue.
7. Cobuild Lab ($1.08M/year)
Angel Lacret (from Miami, Florida, USA) started Cobuild Lab over 5 years ago.
My name is Angel Lacret, I’m the CEO and Founder of Cobuild Lab. We are a company that partners with industry experts to create Custom Software Solutions, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT.
I started here on my own, but with a team back in Venezuela. Now I have a co-founder, 5 full-time employees in Miami, and close to 50 remote full-time workers all over the world.
8. TRIARE ($300K/year)
Boris Abazher (from Cherkasy, Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine) started TRIARE ago.
Hi, my name is Boris and I am the founder and CEO of the software development company TRIARE based in Ukraine. We help businesses and startups to transform their ideas into accomplished digital solutions.
I want to share how personal and collective responsibility paired with patience and consistency can help you build a profitable, respected business. It’s not easy, but it shouldn’t be painful. Here’s my story.
9. Dreamonkey ($360K/year)
Federico Schianchi (from Scandiano, Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy) started Dreamonkey over 5 years ago.
Hello, I am Federico Schianchi and I started Dreamonkey in 2016 with four partners.
Our non-stop improvement and our strategic choices allowed us to grow from the first year $90K of revenue to today $300K of revenue, with the constant growth of 50% per year.
10. Dusseau and Company ($420K/year)
Mark Dusseau (from District of Columbia, DC, USA) started Dusseau and Company over 5 years ago.
My name is Mark, and I am the founder of Dusseau and Company. A boutique product development company that empowers diverse founders. We work with clients diverse in thought, culture, identity, and abilities.
11. OneHash, Inc. ($144K/year)
Rohit Gadia (from Bangalore, Karnataka, India) started OneHash, Inc. about 3 years ago.
Hello, my name is Rohit Gadia; co-founder of OneHash Inc. As of today, we offer two products namely OneHash CRM and OneChat that cater to small businesses looking to benefit from a combination of FOSS+ SaaS at an affordable cost that is generally available to the larger enterprises.
OneHash offers its services to businesses in e-commerce, education, agriculture, non-profits, and hospitality and is most prevalent in healthcare and manufacturing.
12. Data Excavator ($48K/year)
Vitaly (from Tbilisi, Georgia) started Data Excavator over 4 years ago.
Hi! My name is Vitaly, and I am a programmer. More precisely - a programmer and an entrepreneur. On one hand, I just love programming (15 years in PHP, JS, C#, C++, MySQL, and PostgreSQL). On the other hand, I hate doing it.
And while there are many opinions about the ethics of scraping, scraping applications remain a needed and sought-after product. I'm not saying that copying other people's content is fun or useful. But I can say that in many cases, scraping benefits everyone involved in the commodity-money relationship. Without detriment or problems for any of them. So, our story will be just about the bright side of data processing. Here we go!
13. ScrapingBee ($99.6K/year)
Today’s guest had been hearing about stories of entrepreneurship and finally he took the leap himself. And do you know what happened? He failed. Badly. You’ll hear that story in this interview and how he eventually got to where he is today. Kevin Sahin is the founder of ScrapingBee, a web scraping A…
Kevin Sahin and Pierre de Wulf (from Paris, Île-de-France, France) started ScrapingBee over 4 years ago.
ScrapingBee was founded by Kevin Sahin and Pierre de Wulf. It’s a useful tool specially designed to help people or businesses that need to quickly scrape the web but don't want to spend a lot of time doing it.
They completely bootstrapped their business and built their MVP very quickly, as they needed cash to come in as quickly as possible.
The business started in 2019 and in just three years, the founders have grown ScrapingBee to $1M+ ARR. 99% of revenue is attributed to SEO strategies and practices.
The ScrapingBee API takes care of headless browsers and rotates proxies so you can concentrate on data extraction. They set up the web application, database, and the entire system on Heroku.
Businesses across a variety of industries, including e-commerce for price monitoring, SEO firms for tracking SERP results, lead generation, and general data mining, uses ScrapingBee.

Read the full story on failory.com ➜
14. Glean ($25.3M/year)
Arvind Jain noticed a problem that so many founders running a remote team can relate to. Here’s the scenario: a person on your sales team wants to know what new features are in the product pipeline. They need the answer to close a sale, but the answer is buried in a Slack channel, or a Google Sheet,…
Arvind Jain (from Palo Alto, CA, USA) started Glean over 4 years ago.
Arvind started Glean in 2019 to make it simple for people to find the knowledge they require to be more successful and content at work.
The founder decided to build Glean when he saw a need for a tool that could help people gather data from various sources to help with their business.
Glean is the intuitive work assistant providing search solutions to teams to discover exactly the information they need to grow their business.
Before Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, a fast-growing cloud data management company. Rubrik made 600,000,000 in revenue in the fiscal year 2020 and provided jobs to around 2500 employees.

Listen to the full podcast on alejandrocremades.com ➜
15. SmartSuite ($1.2M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchSmartSuite CEO Jon Darbyshire, made a work management platform... Visit them: www.smartsuite.comSee more...
Jon Darbyshire (from Newport Beach, CA, USA) started SmartSuite about 2 years ago.
Tara Darbyshire, Peter Novosel, and Jon Darbyshire founded the SmartSuite, which provides a collaborative Work Management platform that enables teams to plan, track and manage workflows.
Before building SmartSuite, the founders took the time to understand what appeals to that market - how they collaborate, communicate, and manage files.
Around 90 outside developers worked for 3 years to build the core platform, and it managed to acquire 400 customers in just 4 weeks at $100,000 MRR
SmartSuite currently offers three monthly seat pricing tiers:
- $10 for Team
- $25 for Pro
- $35 for Enterprise.
Currently, they are seeing 10 to 12 seats per customer on average. The largest deal they had closed since their launch four weeks ago is for 150 seats.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
17. Pingboard ($6.3M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchPingboard CEO Bill Boebel: Employee engagement software... Visit them: www.pingboard.comSee more of Bill...
Laith Dahiyat (from Austin, TX, USA) started Pingboard over 10 years ago.
Bill Boebel is the founder and former CEO of Pingboard, and he will continue to serve as chairman of the board and a key advisor.
Pingboard is an employee engagement platform designed for remote workers. It gives your staff access to crucial data about individuals, teams, and the business.
This tool speeds up the onboarding process for new employees, provides interesting information at the perfect time, and fosters closer relationships among coworkers.
The goal of this business is to completely transform workforce planning. The management of hiring strategies across the organization, the creation of career paths, and the adoption of new agile organizational models become more challenging as businesses grow.
Bill started the business from scratch and has since served over 750,000 employees across 2,500 companies globally.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the remote work trend, and as a result, demand for their services has increased, resulting in 16 straight months of growth. Now, in 2022, Pingboard has had 3K users so far and generated $6.3M in revenue.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
18. Habu ($12M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchHabu CEO Matthew Kilmartin: Data cleanroom software innovator... Visit them: www.habu.comSee more of Mat...
Matt Kilmartin (from San Francisco, California, USA) started Habu over 5 years ago.
- Tom Chavez, Vivek Vaidya, Matt Kilmartin, and Mike Moreau are the founders of Habu, a SaaS company that provides software for data clean rooms.
- Habu supports businesses in producing high-value analytics from regulated datasets while defending customer privacy and data owners' rights.
- The company has offices in Boston and New York and its headquarters in San Francisco.
- In 2022, Habu made $12M in revenue from just 50 customers.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
19. DashThis ($4.2M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchDashThis CEO AntoineParé: Digital marketing reporting software... Visit them: www.dashthis.com#latka #sa...
Antoine Mailloux (from Québec, Québec, Canada) started DashThis over 12 years ago.
Stephane Guérin is the creator of DashThis, an automated marketing reporting tool created to help marketers save hours of work and create their reports in the blink of an eye.
Stéphane, an IT nerd and entrepreneur, was motivated to develop DashThis by his struggles with monthly reporting at his digital agency.
Since Stephane founded DashThis, he has shifted his attention to the strategic side of the company.
This automated reporting tool was built to help marketers save hours of strenuous work to make the reports in no time.

Read the full story on ideamensch.com ➜
20. Abstrakt ($2M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchAbstrakt CEO Greg Reffner: Real-time call coaching software... Visit them: www.abstrakt.aiSee more of Gr...
Greg Reffner (from Phoenix, Arizona, USA) started Abstrakt over 3 years ago.
- Greg Reffner is the creator of Conversational Intelligence software who also launched Abstrakt. ai in March 2020, just as the pandemic was causing the entire planet to collapse.
- Abstrakt is a real-time & practical call coaching software that helps every sales rep and leader avoid the agony of forgetting their number by combining machine learning, natural language processing, and custom algorithms.
- The founder invested $60,000 of his own funds to develop a proof of concept before finally launching Abstrakt.ai in March 2020.
- Greg looked for a technical Co-Founder to launch Abstrakt.ai with him because he isn't a technical person.
- Abstrakt.ai raised an additional $500,000 in a Seed Round at the end of 2021, valued at $4 million.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
21. CartHook ($1M/year)
The startup podcast with more than 500 episodes to help you launch and grow. 10 million+ downloads. 500+ five-star reviews.
Jordan Gal (from Portland, Oregon, USA) started CartHook over 10 years ago.
CartHook, a Shopify app created by Jordan Gal, helps users increase their income and AOV (Average order value) by allowing them to make genuine post-purchase offers to their customers.
When many sellers were moving to Shopify to sell their physical products, Jordan saw an opportunity to provide these Shopify merchants with post-purchase offers as there was a massive gap in the market for this feature.
The tool enables e-commerce businesses on Shopify to add a new income stream to their checkout through post-purchase upsells. This DTC checkout optimization software has handled over $1 billion for their merchants.
Jordan also previously launched an e-commerce business and generated roughly $500k in revenue in 12 months before selling it.

Listen to the full podcast on thegood.com ➜
22. TerminusDB ($240K/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchTerminusDB CEO Luke Feeney: Git for data... Visit them: www.terminusdb.comSee more of Luke's data: https...
Luke Feeney (from Dublin, Ireland) started TerminusDB over 4 years ago.
In 2019 Luke Feeney founded TerminusDB, an open-source knowledge graph database that offers dependable, private, and effective revision control & collaboration.
TerminusDB is for people who love coding and aspire to make fundamental changes regarding how data is curated, managed, or stored.
Kevin Feeney and Gavin Mendel-Gleason came on board to help the idea for TerminusDB turn into reality. The former is the company's CEO, while the latter, having extensive programming and software specification knowledge, is the CTO.
TerminusDB, a Trinity College Dublin spinoff, has raised €3.6 million in seed funding for its open-source collaboration platform for large and complex data.
TerminusDB joined the AI Infrastructure Alliance earlier this year, a nonprofit organization and industry group created to promote greater cooperation among artificial intelligence and machine learning start-ups worldwide.

Listen to the full podcast on soundcloud.com ➜
23. Enquire AI ($1.5M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchEnquire AI CEO Cenk Sidar: Enquire is on a mission to make organizations knowledge-efficient. We provide...
Cenk Sidar (from Washington, Columbiana, OH, USA) started Enquire AI over 5 years ago.
Enquire AI was founded by Fatih Orhan, Cenk Sidar, and Bilal Baloch. They offer an AI-powered platform to the top businesses in the world so they can instantly benefit from global subject-matter expertise.
The Washington, DC-based business uses artificial intelligence to help companies find international subject-matter expertise in real-time from internal and external resources.
Enquire was founded in 2018 after realizing that professionals are underutilized resources. It was formerly known as GlobalWonks.
Enquire collaborates with 50 businesses worldwide and 300 clients. The company's revenue increased by 300% in the last year, and its expert network expanded by 207%.

Listen to the full Podcast on podcasts.apple.com ➜
24. Raffle ($1.1M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchRaffle CEO Suzanne Lauritzen: Enterprise Search... Visit them: www.raffle.aiSee more of Suzanne's data: ...
Suzanne Lauritzen (from Copenhagen, Denmark) started Raffle over 5 years ago.
Suzanne Lauritzen is the co-founder and CEO of Raffle, an enterprise search engine with AI at its core.
This startup markets its product as the next generation of artificial intelligence-driven enterprise search engines.
Raffle uses intelligent search tools that provide employees and customers with prompt, accurate answers while gathering valuable information about their needs and satisfaction.
This platform unlocks a never-ending re-learning cycle and reduces bounce rates, calls, live chats, and emails by 34% on average.
Raffle AI has raised $21.8 million as of January 22 from K1 Investment Management, Vaeksfonden, and PreeSeed Ventures.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
25. Codiga ($660K/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchCodiga CEO Julien Delange: True bonding for remote teams... Visit them: www.codiga.ioSee more of Julien'...
Julien Delange (from Denver, Colorado, USA) started Codiga over 3 years ago.
Julien Delange founded Codiga, a platform offering code snippets & code analysis services that aids programmers in producing better code faster.
Codiga automates code reviews on GitHub, Gitlab, and Bitbucket by identifying security flaws, duplicate code, and other issues in over 10 programming languages.
Codiga announced the completion of its seed funding round after collecting $2.1M from numerous illustrious investors.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
26. Gruntify ($3M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchGruntify CEO Igor Stjepanovic: Field workforce automation... Visit them: www.gruntify.comSee more of Igo...
Igor Stjepanovic (from Newstead QLD, Australia) started Gruntify over 7 years ago.
- Igor Stjepanovic bootstrapped Gruntify, an automation tool designed for the field workforce.
- This tool makes it simple to manage teams, automate job assignments, manage assets, collect field data, and streamline business processes from a single platform.
- They combine geospatial, augmented reality, and real-time messaging technologies to assist clients in getting the correct information to the right person at the right time.
- Gruntify has built its customer base organically and currently generates $250K MRR. The business is confidently ending the current fiscal year with 25% more revenue.
- The business has also raised revenue through upselling strategy and high customer retention.
- Igor confidently hopes to raise $5M-10M in funding to finance their growth and expansion.

Watch the full video on youtube.com ➜
27. Client Portal ($48K/year)
The startup podcast with more than 500 episodes to help you launch and grow. 10 million+ downloads. 500+ five-star reviews.
Laura (Williams) Elizabeth founded Client Portal, a project management plugin, in 2017.
It is a super simple WordPress plugin that people can use to provide their clients access to all files at any time and let them track the project's progress.
Laura founded this firm while working as a freelancer and needed a platform to help organize client projects.
In the first year of launching the business, she made $4K in monthly earnings from her WordPress plugin.
The founder is a multitasker - a designer, writer, speaker, and also cross-stitching in her free time.
Client Portal is the first-ever product launched by Laura. Though this business started as a side gig, it became her full-time business very shortly.
Later she also launched two other businesses - Design Academy (a design course made for developers) and Project Pack (collections of documents and templates for freelancers and businesses).
Laura was primarily hesitant to use social media to connect to her audience, however, later, she realized that Facebook & Twitter could be important platforms for reaching new clients, interacting with them, and getting feedback.
Here are some of Laura's best practices
- Building in the open and sharing projects in public enabled her to land more clients and partnerships
- She made just under $10K through Black Friday deals
- putting herself out there early rather than waiting until she had something to sell fast-tracked her success.
- Podcasts have been key to her successful entrepreneurship
- Cross-selling and developing projects that target the same audience have helped her grow the brand

28. Agendrix ($4.6M/year)
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NathanLatkawatchAgendrix CEO Sebastien Charland: Workforce Management Software... Visit them: www.agendrix.comSee more o...
André Gauthier, Charles Vallières, Mathieu Allaire, and Samuel Roy (from Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada) started Agendrix over 8 years ago.
Agendrix is a company founded by André Gauthier, Charles Vallières, Mathieu Allaire, and Samuel Roy. They offer workforce management software to retailers, restaurants, nursing homes, and more.
The web-based and mobile app manages team communication and scheduling; its pro version also keeps track of time, handles timesheets, and exports to payroll.
They started as a group of friends building an agency that brought in $500K the first year. After their first year in business, they shut it down entirely and transferred it to a SaaS platform, now known as Agendrix.
They launched in 2015 and have been growing steadily ever since. They just received their second round of funding in August 2021, which included $4.2 million from BDC Capital and Desjardins Capital.

Listen to the full podcast on podcasts.apple.com ➜
29. Concentrix ($5.59B/year)
Today I’m happy to have Andreea Matei on the show. Andreea is the creator of Launch Grow Joy where she helps e-commerce businesses get free publicity.
Chris Caldwell (from Newark, California, USA) started Concentrix over 40 years ago.
- Chris Caldwell established Concentrix, a digital consumer experience company. It is an award-winning organization that was started in 1983 and has grown to service a wide range of sectors, such as automotive, banking, healthcare, travel, & retail.
Chris has played a significant role in helping the firm develop from 25 employees to over 225,000 team members worldwide. The company provides more than 275 facilities in 40 countries with significant YoY growth.
Concentrix sales were $6.150B through August 31, 2022, a 13.45% growth year over year. The company’s annual sales for 2021 were $5.587 billion, up 18.38% from 2020.
The founder has received several honors for creativity, entrepreneurship, and management, including the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Young Entrepreneur Award at age 20.
They are experts in design, marketing, business procedures, and customer management. Concentrix has expanded through various acquisitions, bringing eight firms on board since 2006.
Concentrix purchased IBM’s insurance administration business solutions and services in 2013. It has over 100 Fortune Global 500 companies and 125 new economy clients.
Concentrix serves clients in the key industry verticals:
- Technology & consumer electronics
- Retail
- Travel & eCommerce
- Banking
- Financial services & insurance

30. Cognism ($25M/year)
James Isilay (from London, England, UK) started Cognism over 8 years ago.
James Isilay is the CEO and owner of Cognism, a B2B sales intelligence provider that assists businesses in finding their next best customer.
Cognism is a global leader in international sales intelligence, having established a new bar for data quality and compliance and being trusted by 1800+ revenue teams globally.
In January 2022, this business received an $87,500,000 investment round.
In March 2022, Cognism acquired Kaspr.io (France), a LinkedIn sales automation software company.
Key growth strategies:
- Hiring international talent through freelancing platforms
- Targeting international markets
- Organic marketing strategies
- Mergers & Acquisitions targeting complementary partners

List the full story on podcasts.apple.com ➜
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