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StreamYard
👤 Geige Vandentop & Dan Briggs (Two engineers who bootstrapped StreamYard with 19 people and no funding, fixated on one thing: a browser stream that never drops.)🌐 site
No download, no crash: a browser-tab live studio 100,000+ creators paid for, bootstrapped and sold to Hopin for $250M.
Will it work? · our read
Bought for $250M. Bootstrapped to $30M ARR with 19 people and no investors, StreamYard was the rare SaaS a buyer could bolt on with little diligence. Hopin paid $250M, then sold it on in 2024.
01How the money moves
A creator opens a browser tab — no install — and sets up a branded show
→
They go live to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn at once, StreamYard logo on screen
→
They pay monthly to drop the logo and add brands — 100,000+ did
02The numbers
$30M ARRStatedbootstrapped, at 2021 sale
2020-12-31source:
TechCrunch (7 Jan 2021): 'StreamYard had itself scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital.'
The $250M price is from TechCrunch's report of the January 2021 announcement; the customer count and monthly growth are from VirtualEdge's reprint. StreamYard was private, so nothing here is filed.
Bootstrapped with no outside capital: about $10M revenue in 2020 rising to about $30M ARR by year-end, run by 19 people — then sold to Hopin for $250M, about 8x ARR.
🔒
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
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TechCrunch, 7 Jan 2021 — StreamYard 'scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital'; Hopin bought it for $250 million 'in a mix of cash and stock'; the combined entity would be about $65 million in ARR.Virtual Edge, Jan 2021 — reprints the announcement: more than 100,000 paid users, about 10,000 new paid users a month, almost $10 million revenue in 2020 rising to nearly $30 million by year-end, no external investment in 2.5 years, 19 staff, founders Dan Briggs and Geige Vandentop.MarTech, 7 Jan 2021 — describes StreamYard as a browser-based live streaming studio that streams directly to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other platforms; price $250 million.Wikipedia: StreamYard — founded by Geige Vandentop and Dan Briggs, released 12 July 2018; Hopin acquired it for $250 million on 7 Jan 2021; Bending Spoons agreed to acquire StreamYard on 9 April 2024.
Revenue is STATED, not FILED: StreamYard was privately held, so there is no filing. The $30M ARR is the company's own figure from its January 2021 acquisition announcement. I did NOT open the first-party BusinessWire press release — it returned HTTP 403 and then timed out for me — so revenue.sourceUrl points at TechCrunch (7 Jan 2021), which I opened and which prints 'StreamYard had itself scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital.' That same page prints the $250 million price 'in a mix of cash and stock' and the about $65M combined ARR. The customer figures (100,000+ paid users, about 10,000 new a month, about $10M in 2020 to about $30M by year-end, no outside capital, 19 staff) come from VirtualEdge, which I opened and which reprints the announcement; I could not confirm the exact '$1M to $30M' framing seen in search snippets, so I did not use it. All figures are already in USD — no currency conversion. I read these pages with WebFetch, a model summary, so I corroborated the two headline numbers ($30M ARR and $250M) across TechCrunch, VirtualEdge, MarTech and Wikipedia, which agree. verified is false because I reached the company's figures only through secondary reprints, not a first-party page I could open. Scope: in-scope — a browser-based subscription web product. The about 8x multiple is my arithmetic ($250M / $30M). Drama is documented, not invented: Hopin later declined and sold StreamYard to Bending Spoons in 2024 (Wikipedia); no rival or figure was fabricated. We never score you.