5 Team Collaboration App Success Stories [2023]

My name is Michael Hollauf, I’m one of the founders of Meister, and we currently have two very popular apps for team creativity and productivity on the market — MindMeister is the biggest online mind mapping app with over 11 million users worldwide, and MeisterTask is our new agile task management tool that already has 3 million users and is catching up fast with the likes of Trello and Asana, having won both Apple’s and Google’s Best of the Year award in its launch year.

We’re currently close to US$ 10 million ARR with our Freemium subscription business model on both apps.

My name is Dmitry Barashev and I am the guy who is working on GanttProject, a popular free open-source project scheduling application for desktop operating systems. GanttProject may be thought of as a replacement for Microsoft Project for those who can’t afford to spend $1000 on a Gantt chart drawing software. It is used by small and medium-sized businesses in construction, mechanical engineering, media production, and other industries, as well as at colleges on project management classes.

GanttProject is free for any purpose, however, there is an option to pay-what-you-want and, to my big surprise, quite a few people choose this option. This, along with a few ad banners, generates about $3000-5000 monthly. Quite far from the Forbes list, but not bad for a pet project.

We have over 10,000 users in 65 countries, including Microsoft, Harvard University, Samsung, Disney, and more. We’re currently at $140k annual recurring revenue and doubling every year.