Clipwing Surpasses $50K MRR

my story started with insecurity

i always felt like i wasn’t enough – like people didn’t respect me, like i had to become someone bigger for anyone to notice me. i don’t even know why i felt that way, but it is what it is

i was working as a ui/ux designer, and one day i joined @paralect. after ~6 months, i started building my own project on the side – juggling client work and my idea at the same time. paralect helped me – they gave my project to junior developer to build me an mvp

a few months later paralect told me they were ready to "invest" in me – meaning i’d work full-time on my idea and still get a salary, and my developer gets salary, even though the project wasn’t making money yet

the salary was small. for my immigrant life it basically meant: pay rent, and maybe go out with friends on the weekend once or twice

i knew that with my experience i could go get a much bigger salary at a cool startup. but my insecurity was screaming at me: lera, shut up and work. this is your chance

so i spent 6 more months on that salary and nothing worked. and then they told me – either the project works now, or you shut it down

that’s when i pivoted the app into a service. and things finally started moving

there weren’t thousands of dollars at first, but on launch day i got 2 (!!) sales – which at that time was $1,2k!! and that was enough to show me i was on the right path. today our minimum monthly package is $3k, but back then it was $600. and before that we made videos for free just to get noticed… omg what a long and wild journey

now, 1,5 years later, our mrr is almost 50k. we work with some of the top companies in the world. i can’t share a lot publicly because of nda, but honestly, if you told me this two years ago, i wouldn't believed it and would laughed. today i’m paying paralect back every month, and i’m still under their legal entity because of my immigration situation

i cover the salaries of my entire team. i cover my own payments – and i even raised it to a level that’s comfortable for me. me!! not a boss giving me a raise – i earned it myself

i’m insanely happy with who i am today, with what i’ve built, and with the fact that i ended up at paralect.

clipwing is a startup that’s 10% paralect-baked and 90% bootstrapped – and i’m super proud of that

and i hope you all remember where you started and feel proud of yourselves too

because sometimes i get sad like "ugh only $50k, others make millions," and i forget that someone out there has 0. and i myself once had 0. but i walked the path, and i’m happy

and now i don’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone. after everything, i finally understand that i am more than enough

i love you, paralect. thank you for clipwing. and thank you for helping me become the person i always wanted to be