What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How did they get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Today I'm talking to Alim Mawani, the founder of a company called Streak. Alim and I both started companies around the same time in 2011 for me in 2012 for him.

We were both funded by Y Combinator and both of us built Chrome extensions that modify your Gmail inbox and attempt to make you more productive.

The difference between our two companies is that his still exists. I gave up, quit, moved on to other

things, whereas Aleem and his co-founder kept plugging away. And today, his company is very profitable,

generates millions in revenue, employs a few dozen people, and he's just happy running it. So in

this episode, we get to hear Alim's story and how we got here. It's cool talking to you because

we've both done things in the email space. Like I did Y Combinator back in 2011 with this App Task Force, and Paul Graham had this huge kick about how everybody's going to work from their inbox. Everybody already is working for their inbox. And if you could just build something interesting on top of the inbox, like that's your Trojan horse to get hundreds of millions of users. And it didn't really work out that way for me. You ended up pivoting away from

task force and working on other things. But I think you started streaking, went in 2012.

Early 2012, yeah. We were in YC 2011. We should talk about that later, but we pivoted through

YC and yeah, 2012 is when we actually got serious about

streak. It's been eight years now. How well is streak doing in terms of, you know, revenue,

users, company size, or however you measure your success? Yeah, revenue is obviously a big part of it.

I think the part that we're most proud of is profitable, being sort of a profitable

Silicon Valley startup. You know, it kind of

shouldn't be abnormal, but it is. And so we're happy that we are sort of self-sustaining and basically

control our destiny. So yeah, profitable. We have 30 folks on the team. We were in two offices

before and now we're remote like most people. And yeah, revenue in the millions.

Super exciting and not particularly common for companies, I think that were started back

then to try to be profitable. So I remember doing YC and building an email product.

And the partners there are saying like, why are you, why are you charging money?

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