From 0 to $200 Million (solo founder)

How this solo founder managed to build a company from 0 to $200 Million in revenue…

In 2003, Anthony Casalena was a regular student at the University of Maryland.

He had zero skills and zero dollars.

Fast forward to 2017 – His company, Squarespace, is an online tool for building and publishing websites.
It supports more than 1 million websites and generates $200 Million in revenue.

Here‘s his story…

April 2003. He didn‘t have money, never learned programming or design, but had to because he wanted to build a home on the Internet.
He didn’t think that he was building a business. He was fixing his own problem.

January 2004. Anthony launched the first iteration of the tool he built and Squarespace was born.
He borrowed $30,000 from his father to buy computer servers to host the Squarespace code.

2004 – 2007. For 3 years Anthony ran Squarespace alone. He wrote the code, educated and interacted with customers, and managed marketing.
Instead of competing with Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla, he focused on another audience that values beautiful design.

Result: By the time Anthony graduated from college, Squarespace was making more than $1 million in revenue.

Then he moved to New York and grew the team to include about 30 employees.

2008 – 2010. Casalena and two other team members rewrote the code, improving the college-dorm room version and made it scaleable.

July 2010. The company raised $38.5 million from Accel Partners and Index Ventures.

April 2014. Squarespace raised another $40 million from General Atlantic.

November 2014. Squarespace acquired Brace.io, a website creation startup powered by cloud tools.

In 2015, revenues topped $100 million, growing to 550 employees working at the private company.

In 2016, Anthony Casalena’s company generated more than $200 million in revenue.