Groove

Alex Turnbull launched Groove in 2012 after selling his first company and wanting to build something more substantial. Groove was a helpdesk tool — email-based support software — deliberately positioned as the simpler, cheaper alternative to Zendesk. He built his audience before launching, writing candidly on the Groove blog about the exact journey from $0 to $100k MRR: revenue numbers, conversion rates, churn, what worked and what failed. The blog became more famous than the product for a while — it drove tens of thousands of sign-ups from founders who wanted to follow along. The strategy worked. By 2017 Groove crossed $500k MRR. By 2024 it reached $5M ARR with a fully remote team. Entirely bootstrapped. Alex became known for transparent founder storytelling and later launched Helply, an AI-powered help desk tool, again bootstrapped, documenting the journey publicly. He's one of the clearest examples of founder-led content marketing that compounds over years.