Vacation Tracker
👤 Lav Crnobrnja (Ran Cloud Horizon, a 40-person dev agency; it funded the build, staffed it, and was the first team to feel the spreadsheet pain.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
A dev agency built a PTO tracker for its own spreadsheet pain, grew it Slack-first to about $3M ARR, no VC.
Will it work? · our read
Won on channel. The product is a cheap PTO tracker. What worked was going Slack-first for distribution and writing only high-intent content. Copy the channel discipline, not the feature.
01How the money moves
A team installs the free Slack, Teams, or Google leave bot
→
It outgrows the free plan (1 location, 1 leave type)
→
Upgrade to $2-4 per active user each month
02The numbers
about $3MStatedARR, founder-stated
2025-12
the sentence on the page
0 to $3M ARR - How Two Bootstrapped Founders Built Vacation Tracker (and Brought in a $100M+ CEO) Our MCP is live! Try it! Product Pla
ARR is founder-stated on the company's Dec 2025 blog post, not a filing or audit. Company blog, Dec 2025
About $3M ARR, bootstrapped on agency profits, no VC.
🔒
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- 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
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Vacation Tracker — 0 to $3M ARR (company blog, Dec 2025)vacationtracker.io — homepage (3,500+ companies, brand logos)vacationtracker.io/pricing — Free / Core $2 / Complete $4 per userLav Crnobrnja — LinkedInVacation Tracker — Q&A with CEO Lav Crnobrnja
Revenue (about $3M ARR) is founder-stated on the company's own blog (Dec 9, 2025 post: "approaching $3M ARR") — sourced STATED, first-party but self-reported, not a filing or audit. An earlier SaaS Club podcast (Aug 2024) had the founder citing about $2M ARR, so the number has grown; this card reflects the fresher figure. The 3,500+ companies and $2-4/user pricing come from the company's own site and pricing page (2026). I could NOT confirm an Inc 5000 / Deloitte Fast 500 listing for Vacation Tracker, so despite the requested award/ranking angle this is a documented-growth bootstrapped case, not a verified ranking winner — flagging that honestly rather than fabricating a placement. The Slack-first move is documented in the CEO's own Q&A (vacationtracker.io/blog/qa-with-vacation-tracker-ceo) — he says they focused on building around Slack and consider their Slack bot superior to competitors', paraphrased here rather than quoted verbatim. The "free storefront" framing and the HRIS-bundling death scenario are [our read]. No invented drama — they won on channel choice and intent-driven content, not a single dramatic bet. We never score you.