A year-by-year study on how SaaS companies became unicorns

Hi Product Hunt

My name is Victor Z, and I am the maker of the SaaS Yearbook project. I am excited to share this project with the Product Hunt community!

Over the last few months, as I was developing my own productivity tool, I decided to study 6 SaaS unicorns (valued at over $10 Billion) to understand how they became who they are today, and I wish to share what I learned with all PHers.

The 6 SaaS tools I researched were (along with my one-liner insights):

Slack - Slack is actually the second successful pivot by Steward Butterfield. Both pivots were from the failure of gaming projects. Discord - the making of the internet’s hottest bar for Gen Z Notion - how a duo of digital nomads saved their product by starting from zero again Figma - A design tool for more than just designers Miro - How a small agency in Russia created the internet’s most popular whiteboard. Airtable - How one startup democratized database and accelerated the no-code movement.

Why did I build it? As a SaaS entrepreneur, I believe a company’s true success stories are normally some lesser-known facts that you can’t find on mainstream media like TechCrunch. As a result, I have always wanted to conduct an extensive, in-depth, and chronological study on how SaaS startups became unicorns and share my learnings with the community.

What’s unique about it?

With this yearbook, I wish to show people not just what I learned, but also HOW I LEARNT - I believe when information behind knowledge is presented in the right way, people can learn effectively. This means the yearbook is curated in the following way:

CHRONOLOGICAL: All the companies in the yearbook are studied and presented in a year-by-year format, with the intention to best illustrate their organic growth of them.

CONTEXTUAL: All the insights listed in the yearbook are presented with a curated link to a source(websites), where readers can trace the context and background, simply through a click.

PERPETUAL: All the sources and websites are preserved and presented in their original format, to demonstrate the story as authentic as possible.

Victor