Josh Pigford

💡 Josh Pigford, in one box

The tally: 95 projects since 2003. Of those, 31 sold, 45 were shut down, and 11 are still active today. That ratio is the whole story: he ships constantly, most of it dies or sells small, and every few years one of them hits.

Where he works, his verticals:

📊 SaaS and business tools, his home turf. Baremetrics, PopSurvey, Temper, Optic, SchemaKit, Revise.dev. Metrics, surveys and dashboards for other companies.

💰 Money and fintech. Baremetrics again, Maybe, Synth, KeptWell (your family's medical binder), Granite (a vault for your documents). He keeps coming back to money paperwork.

🤖 AI tools, the current wave. Detangle, Dodgeblob, NameSnag, MuteTheWeb, BotBlock, Rumored.ai, and FirstIndex, his AI visibility agency, reportedly at about $570,000 ARR within a month of launching.

🎮 Games and toys. Fugitive Toys, Rockburg, Dodgeblob, Society Fail, Super Fantastic, Pleasant Hollow. The playful streak never left.

📚 Content, communities, and weird little sites. TheAppleBlog, Indie Riot, PugSpot (a community for pug owners, sold ten years later), weird.diamonds. Plus a small mountain of 2000s directories and affiliate sites where it all started.

Biggest sale: Baremetrics, sold for $4,000,000 in 2020, seven years after he built it in about a week to scratch his own itch. Runner up: TheAppleBlog, acquired by GigaOm for $75,000.

Biggest loss: Maybe. He raised about $1.4 million from roughly 1,300 crowdfunding investors, hired a team of eight, overbuilt ahead of validation, ran out of money, and shut it down. Then the twist no one saw coming: he open sourced the code, it exploded on GitHub, fresh money came in, and Maybe lives again.

The lesson: the wins hide inside the pile. 45 shutdowns is not the failure count. It is the price of the $4,000,000 one.