Bootstrapping Fame to $10m ARR (currently $5.3m).
London, England
Joined April 2014
- Tweets21.5K
- Following4.6K
- Followers5K
- Likes29.5K
Agencies are so back.
2015-2019 was the golden age.
Slowed down...
Now AI and we're back.
Very bullish on agencies.
Fame just passed $5m ARR.
$0 raised
100% founder-owned
It's been brutal:
- 2015-2019: 15 startups. All failed
- December 2019: Started Fame (My former employer became our first client)
- August 2026: $5m ARR
No investors.
No office.
No permission slips.
Just:
- 70 people, fully remote, no HQ
- An early finish every Friday
- Judged on output, not hours
- 300+ shows and 10m+ downloads for brands like Canva, Ramp, Zendesk and Workday
- Fame OS, the software we built to run it all
The secret?
There isn't one.
I failed 15 times, learnt more, and stayed in the game.
If you're in the "nothing's working" phase right now, you're not doing it wrong.
Keep going.
Next stop: $10m.
Here's to the bootstrappers 🥂
FOUNDER WANTED
TLDR: I accidentally created an Italian olive oil brand, it has it's first customer, but I have no time.
Full story coming later...
Sorry to customer #1 that had to be refunded.
Here is the brand: persano.co.uk, and yes it needs some work 🤣
Everyone vibe codes to save money.
Wrong.
Vibe code to build the features no SaaS is allowed to ship.
Our outreach tool (The Machine) now sends calendar invites instead of follow-up emails.
Cheeky? Yes.
Illegal? No.
Working? 🤫
25m impressions on a single post.
24 months of obsession.
220k followers.
Today, the system behind LinkedIn’s fastest profile growth is going open-source (MIT License), the whole thing:
A feeder, a writer, a dashboard, a Chrome extension.
I haven’t been posting much recently as all 9.5 hours of my working day has been spent building all the software I’ve always wanted for Fame.
This weekend my partner went away and left me with our 15 month old who takes really long naps so I decided to distill the system into 21 files and 1,585 lines of code.
It's called Hacking LinkedIn, and it:
👉 Scans creators you trust every morning for inspiration
👉 Trains a writer on your past posts, so drafts sound like you, not ChatGPT
👉 A dashboard that plans three weeks whole week of content in one view
👉 A Chrome extension that saves any post, straight from LinkedIn
👉 Auto-drafts everything into Google Docs, ready for you to edit (important)
👉 Scans an image library and suggests the best pic (also important)
3 years ago, this was 20k custom software project.
I'm giving the whole thing away.
Free. Open source. Yours to copy, break, and rebuild.
Not selling anything. Not gating it behind an email list: github.com/famecodeteam/hack…
Running a remote business is challenging, but @raylo offers a reliable way to get team tech and ensure they feel valued from day one.
You keep your capital for growth.
Check out the options for your team here: mdsh.io/raylo-business
Handwritten notes.
Every two weeks.
To the whole market.
An outrageous outbound strategy, but it worked for @Nick_HagueB2B and B2B International.
They scaled to £20m before exiting to Dentsu.
He knew he couldn't force a prospect to need market research today.
But he ensured that when that "buying window" finally opened, his brand was the only one they remembered.
Catch the full breakdown here: pod.tomhunt.io/e/rnkl1v08-ni…
