Sam Shore — Building Typeshare, a Co-Founded Writing Tool
The process of validating the first paid demand for a small shareable image tool for writing, partnering with writing educators to reach customers, and later revisiting development expansion and retention.
Typeshare, created by Sam Shore, is subscription software that helps with online writing and content publishing. In an Indie Bites interview published on March 5, 2025, it was presented as a business with monthly recurring revenue of $34,000 and more than $1 million in cumulative revenue since its 2021 launch. The user base disclosed at the time was more than 80,000.
Sam said he had tried online businesses since he was 17, but did not make money for the first five years. Before starting Typeshare, he spent about a year building a product called Wavium, and he himself recognized his habit of developing too many features as a problem. He needed to change the pattern of spending time building the product while postponing actual sales.
Setting Aside Time for Development and Sales
So in April 2021, he made a plan to launch 12 businesses over 12 months. Each month, two weeks would go to development and the remaining two weeks to marketing. He limited ideas to those that solved a problem he had personally experienced, could be implemented within two weeks, could charge money from the start, and had a low maintenance burden. He also set a criterion to exclude features that were not essential for sales.
The first idea came while sharing his own writing on social media. Capturing and cropping a notes app screen and posting it looked messy, and the writing images other writers shared were also hard to read. Sam built a tool that turned entered text into attractive shareable images. He released the first version, developed over about two weeks, on April 22, 2021.
On launch day, it did not appear on the front page of Product Hunt, where he had expected it to; the traffic Sam recorded was only 17 people. He moved to Twitter to introduce the product and tagged influential writers, and wrote that he gained 213 people there. Indie Hackers and Hacker News together brought in about 200 people as well. Seeing this difference, Sam judged that directly promoting the product where writers gathered was effective.
He also validated paid demand with a small feature. With the basic editor built, he described Pro features that had not yet been implemented and presold a $150 lifetime license. In the 2025 interview, he said the presale results were about $2,500 over roughly one week. After confirming actual payments, Sam focused on Typeshare and did not move on to the second product in the 12-business plan.
Connecting writing education with the product’s customers
The turning point for the business came when Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole, who ran the writing education program Ship 30 for 30, joined. They taught people to build the habit of writing and publishing for 30 days, and they were looking for writing tools their students needed. According to Cole’s recollection, he found Sam’s product on Twitter and proposed a collaboration first, and the three of them jointly established a separate company to operate Typeshare. The first product Sam built alone became a co-founded business.
Sam said that when the business was already generating several thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue, he gave the two partners a combined two-thirds of the equity without cash consideration. He handled product development, while the two focused on distribution to readers and students. Sam said he was initially reluctant to give up such a large stake, but he later saw the two partners’ distribution as decisive in growing the business.
This collaboration created a structure that supplied software students immediately needed. In a 2022 interview, Dickie explained that students asked where they should write, and Typeshare solved that problem. When people who started writing through the course also used the tool, they could continue working with it after the course ended. The two sought to expand the business by connecting writing education with software people kept using.
Why users paid and early growth
The actual reason for purchase is shown in detail in an account by paid customer Paolo Belcastro. He encountered Typeshare through Ship 30 for 30, and in February 2022, when the trial period ended, he paid $20 per month. What he needed, despite already having his own blog, was a feature that turned essays into readable images. His reason for paying was the calculation that creating the same result himself would take at least 10 minutes per image, or 5 hours per month if he wrote one every day.
According to the growth record Sam shared about a year after launch, it took seven months to reach $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Over the next four months, it rose to $10,000, and over the following 30 days, it reached $15,000. This was a process in which revenue growth accelerated after the initial small paid demand took hold.
From shareable images to a writing and publishing tool
The product also expanded from image creation into writing more broadly. In an official guide from August 2023, Typeshare described the process of entering a topic to get ideas and choosing a desired format, such as a tweet or thread, a LinkedIn post, or a short essay. At the time, it offered more than 200 writing templates, and users could choose a structure and fill in their own content. It also included a feature that evaluated titles and suggested directions for improvement.
The publishing feature evolved to let written posts be published or scheduled on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and personal Typeshare profiles. Personal profiles served as a collection of a writer's own posts, while external platforms received posts formatted for each service. For writers managing multiple channels, it became a tool that reduced the work of copying and reformatting posts.
On April 8, 2025, official pricing listed a free plan, Pro at $20 per month, and Creator at $200 per year. Free users could write and publish on Typeshare and use writing history and internal interaction features. Pro included over 500 templates, scheduled publishing to external social platforms, post performance scores, and idea and outline generation tools. Creator added exclusive templates, content strategy features, and a Ship 30 for 30 discount, maintaining the connection to the education business.
After Expanding the Development Team, Going Back to Customers
After the company grew, problems emerged in expanding the development team. In his 2025 retrospective, Sam said that following 2022 growth, by 2023 Typeshare’s revenue was $30,000 per month, and he hired three additional developers to reinvest in the business. For several months, the team pursued new features, interface redesigns, and optimizations, but revenue did not increase. Development became faster, yet the money customers paid stayed the same.
The cause Sam identified was deciding on features without validating them with customers. He assigned developers features he thought users would like, but did not ask actual users or test them together. He reflected that he spent $336,000 on that decision. Even with experience validating early demand, he learned at a cost that the value of features added later must be validated again.
In 2025, development was reduced again to a structure in which Sam alone handled it. The goal he set was to lower the churn rate, disclosed at the time as 12%, to 5%. He said he would talk with users to improve the core value that keeps them using the product, and after reaching that goal, consider expansion again. He began making why customers stay and why they leave the standard for development, rather than how many new features were released.