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Two lazy engineers automated the part of GitHub that GitHub wouldn't build, gave it free to open source, and now bill 150 engineering teams ~$750/month each — $110K/month, bootstrapped
150+ customers · ~$750/mo average · 3x growth in 12 months from ~$35K/mo (founder-confirmed)
"We have two hours of spare time this week — what can we do with only two hours and basically zero dollars?" Four years of side-project constraint is what stopped them from over-building and never launching.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Julian Danjou had been a free-software developer for twenty years, contributing to multiple open source projects and publishing several books on Python. He and his cofounder — both software engineers who had already worked together for five or six years on the same open source project, and known each other for over ten — were building something on GitHub and got annoyed. Their own summary of the motivation: "we are lazy, so the goal was to have a program that does things for you," and GitHub was missing a lot of the features they wanted. Mergify launched in 2018. Neither founder quit anything. They both kept day jobs until roughly 2020-2021 and only went full-time "a couple of years ago" relative to the interview, once revenue could cover one salary and then more hires. Asked directly how they paid rent between 2018 and 2021, the answer is simply that they didn't take money out of the business. Those lean years are the part Julian argues actually helped. Working with two hours of spare time a week and no budget forces a different question: not "what feature should we build?" but "what can we do with two hours and zero dollars?" He contrasts that explicitly with the engineer failure mode of building forever — adding one more feature that will surely bring customers — and never launching. It took a few years to turn a Python script that automated their own work into something a large corporation with a hundred engineers could run. The payoff curve is steep at the end: about $35,000 a month a year before the interview, about $110,000 a month at the time of it. Three times growth in twelve months, entirely bootstrapped, with roughly ten people.
The first customers were open source projects, and they paid nothing. Both founders had been active in open source for years, so the free tier went first to projects they already worked in — Julian names Ceph, a major distributed-storage project, which ran Mergify across its repositories.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
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Data credibility: Founder interview, but note how the headline number was produced: the founder stated that most customers pay between 500 and 1,000 per month and that the average team is about 100 engineers; the interviewer took the $750 midpoint, multiplied by the stated 150+ customers, arrived at ~$110,000/month, and the founder said "yeah, that's great." It is confirmed arithmetic, not a dashboard figure, and the transcript renders the unit ambiguously as "Euro dollars" so the currency of the 500-1,000 range cannot be pinned down. The prior-year figure of ~$35,000/month is the founder's recollection of what he had told the same interviewer a year earlier. The 2018 launch date, the 150+ customer count, the four-tier plan structure including a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise Server option, the ~10-person team (7 engineers, 2 marketing), the fully bootstrapped funding history, the 50/50 equity split, and the free-for-open-source distribution strategy are all founder-stated. The TLDR newsletter sponsorship price is explicitly a guess — he says he doesn't remember and offers ~$2,000 within a range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The auto-generated captions are heavily mangled: the company appears as 'merge if I', 'mergeofy', 'modify', 'energy fire' and 'Mercury'; the founder as 'Julian donjo'; and the cofounder's name is unreadable, appearing variously as 'Native', 'Billy', 'Mary' and 'many'. No country or city is stated anywhere in the transcript — the only geographic references are that most customers are in the US and that pricing may be in euros — so region is left null rather than guessed. Note also that GitHub has since shipped a native merge queue, which post-dates this interview.
Revenue is a per-seat subscription, and a first sale in a bottom-up developer tool is not a procurement cycle.
Three loops run at once and all three compound on headcount. The open source tier keeps seeding: every large public repository running Mergify puts it in front of hundreds of contributors who are professional engineers somewhere else during the week.
The stretch was three years long and entirely unpaid. They launched in 2018, both kept day jobs until 2020 or 2021, and the answer to how they covered rent in between is that they took nothing out of the business.
The rest of this breakdown — 10 more sections — is in the Unicorn Club, with every section of all 1,335 ideas: first customers, first dollar, the flywheel, and the silent stretch.
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