GummySearch
👤 Fed (@foliofed) (Technical solo founder embedded in the indie-hacker crowd he sold to — he found customers by dogfooding his tool on Reddit.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
A solo founder grew a Reddit research tool to $35K/mo, always profitable — then Reddit's API terms shut it down.
Will it work? · our read
Rented land. A textbook profitable bootstrapped product that did everything right — and still died because its one data source, Reddit, held all the leverage. Own your inputs.
01How the money moves
Index 10,000+ subreddits via Reddit's API
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Founders search for pain points and customers
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Pay $29-199/mo, plus day passes and lifetime deals
02The numbers
about $35K/moEstimateMRR at 2025 shutdown
2025
the sentence on the page
in subreddit conversations. The Numbers Founded : 2021 Team : 1 Subreddits tracked : 10,000+ Revenue : $35K MRR Duration : ~4 years (2021-2025) Reasons for Failure No commercial API agreement :…
Grew from about $3K MRR (2023) to about $35K MRR before the 2025 shutdown. Starter Story
About $35K/mo at 2025 shutdown; $60K in year one; about $96K in 2023.
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You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Founder's shutdown post — GummySearch, The Final Chapter (Nov 2025)Starter Story: built a Reddit search engine to $60K in year oneFailory: When Reddit Pulls Over — $35K MRR post-mortemStartup Obituary: GummySearchFed (@foliofed) on X
Revenue: the $60K year-one figure and about $96K in 2023 are founder-disclosed (Starter Story / Indie Hackers / Latka). The headline $35K/mo peak MRR is reported consistently by Failory and Startup Obituary but is NOT stated in the founder's own shutdown post (which confirmed 135,000 users), so it is marked EST and not independently confirmed. Founding date, user count, and shutdown cause are first-party from gummysearch.com/final-chapter. No numbers were invented. The dies scenario is not hypothetical — it actually happened, documented Nov 2025. We never score you.