Jed Christiansen

I'd say they're more than "fairly" successful:

http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2008/02/25/37signals-is-one-hell-of-a-profitable-business/

Especially since we all know that they've turned down lots of buy offers, and only accepted an investment from Amazon to have access to Bezos. How dreamy.

Not that that proves their assertions are universally applicable, however, they certainly prove that side projects CAN be a (much less treacherous) path to success.

For what it's worth, that's what we're doing with our time tracking service, Freckle (http://letsfreckle.com). Just last week, we passed revenue of $4k/mo and I estimate we'll be able to live off it by end of January 2010.

Completely agree. I wrote a blog post about it a while back [0], but to me the killer feature is being able to pin items as to-dos (or create new todo's unassociated with an email), and then flip the switch so that you ONLY see these pinned items.

I love it because I can only look at my pinned items and focus on knocking a few out at a time, and only occasionally flipping back to the regular inbox view. (Which I find distracting when I need to focus.)

[0] - http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2014/12/02/the-super-magic-productivity-button-in-the-new-google-inbox/

I don't think so, and I don't think they should share that information, but they've given some "clues" (potentially false) over the years with references to things like "over 1 million users." (Though "user" is a vague term considering how their system works.)

In response to a similar question in 2006, Jason Fried said:

We’re a private company so we don’t disclose this information.

A few years ago, someone tried to analyze it and came up with vague revenue estimations: http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2008/02/25/37signals-is-one-hell-of-a-profitable-business/

This reminds me of jedc and his MBA research about startup accelerators and how, and more importantly, when to clone.

His #1 point was:

> You need to be unique, where unique is not just a seed accelerator in a different city

Imagine K12 is unique in their knowledge and connections. What a fascinating proposition.

http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2011/02/23/looking-back-1-5-years-since-copying-y-combinator/

"You won't get rich"

Says who ?

Some estimates peg 37Signals as being profitable to the tune of $6 million per year. Divided equally between the 12 employees that's $500k each. Not bad for a year's work.

For more see: http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2008/12/04/estimating-37signals-revenue-and-general-profitability/