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
→
Founders search for pain points and customers
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Pay $29-199/mo, plus day passes and lifetime deals
02The numbers
$60K
Revenue, year one
Starter Story
$35K/mo
MRR at 2025 shutdown
Failory
10,000+
Lifetime paying customers
Obituary
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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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
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.