ChatGPT hit a hundred million users in two months. Cursor sprinted to $100M ARR. Every AI wrapper looks like it's printing money. Overnight success is everywhere.
Except it isn't.
Ivan Zhao and Simon Last nearly killed Notion twice. First with $50K left, they moved to Kyoto alone. Eighteen hours daily in Figma, redesigning the same interface. Second when COVID hit and their single Postgres database started dying. Months fixing infrastructure while competitors shipped feature after feature.
This is what overnight success actually looks like.
Christina Cacioppo taught herself to code to build Vanta. Six months of manual security audits first. Waking at 5:45 AM to send "automated" emails by hand. Testing if anyone even cared about SOC 2 compliance before writing code. The market didn't want it. She built anyway.
Melanie Perkins pitched Canva to 100 investors who all said no. An Australian company competing with Adobe? She learned to kitesurf just to get 15 minutes with a Silicon Valley investor. Three years of rejection before a single yes. Today, Canva is worth $40 billion.
Michael Grinich built WorkOS for a year without customers. His previous company struggled with the exact problem WorkOS solves. He knew what to build. The market didn't know it needed it.
The Varanasi brothers spent six years building Meter before talking to customers. Six years on firmware and operating systems while software companies printed COVID money. Hardware needs physical presence. Supply chains. On-site installations. Their ops lead wondered if they'd survive 2020.
Vinod Khosla failed at starting a soy milk company. Got rejected from Stanford twice. Sent 400 job applications. Zero responses. His first company, Daisy Systems, failed spectacularly. He went on to co-found Sun Microsystems.
Real problems are hard. Markets need education. Teams need time. The best companies still take a decade to build.
I'm bringing these founders together. Small rooms. Thirty founders max. Recordings for those who can't make it. September, October, and November across US cities.
The name's ironic on purpose. Every overnight success took ten years. We compress the story because nobody wants to hear about the grinding. Come hear about the grind.
Apply at overnightfpv.com.
Sometimes my co-founder and I wonder if we're absolutely insane to keep building without selling, and expanding our MVP. Building for consumers and creating that 'magical moment' through an app takes tremendous effort and the bar is high to grab attention. But these stories remind us we aren't stupid or crazy. Every story is unique yet similar, only long-term survival leads to success. Day 1 or Day 10 don't need to be astounding successes, but Day 10,000 might be. If not, 10,000 days of doing what you love is still success, even if the world doesn't see it that way
Two questions that I would request you to ask these folks: 1) How did they keep themselves motivated in those tough times, their specific rituals/tricks whatever you call it. 2) How did they keep building their confidence to stay put? What signals kept them going?