AJ is a pseudonymous developer in Nashville, Tennessee. Nobody knows his real name. He uses a Johnny Mnemonic helmet shot as his avatar. In the mid-2000s, he made money from exact-match domain sites with ad revenue, and saved almost all of it. That savings became his runway for everything that came after.
Around 2008, AJ started HTML5 UP, a collection of free responsive website templates. He built it to learn responsive design, which was just gaining momentum. Over the next few years, it accumulated over 12 million downloads and became the #1 Google result for "free html5 templates." More importantly, it built him a Twitter following of developers and designers who cared about clean, simple web design.
Then came Pixelarity, the premium version of HTML5 UP. About 100 templates, attribution-free, for $19 a year. It generated $10-12K per month at its peak. This proved two things: people would pay $19/year for simple web tools, and AJ could run a profitable product solo. Every project was building toward the next one, though he didn't know it yet.
In 2015, AJ noticed something. One of his free one-page templates on HTML5 UP was getting downloaded thousands of times per day. People wanted simple single-page sites but couldn't build them, even from a template. What if he turned that into a builder? The idea was modest: a tool to create digital business cards. He called it Carrd, expected it to maybe pay for his coffee habit, and started building.
DONE! Carrd = a free platform for building simple, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.
In early 2016, a follower jumped the gun and posted Carrd to Product Hunt before AJ was ready. He scrambled, DM'd the Product Hunt team, and got properly featured the next day. It hit #1 in tech with over 1,000 upvotes. Revenue on launch day: $1,000. But the real magic was the onboarding. Visitors could start building a site immediately, no signup required. That zero-friction experience converted browsers into users faster than any landing page could.
The growth engine that followed was almost accidental. Every free Carrd site displays a small "Made with Carrd" footer link. Visitors click through, try the builder in 30 seconds (still no account needed), and some convert. This single mechanism replaced all traditional marketing. AJ spent zero minutes per day on marketing, zero dollars on ads, and revenue grew from under $100/day to close to $1,000/day entirely through this viral loop and word of mouth.
Then came the Kim Kardashian moment. On May 30, 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, someone built a BLM resource hub on Carrd. Kim Kardashian tweeted the link to her 66 million followers. Daily registrations jumped from hundreds to thousands overnight. Carrd became the default tool for activist microsites: BLM resources, LGBTQ resources, international protests. MIT Technology Review wrote about "the internet of protest being built on single-page websites." Growth went parabolic and never came back down.
Hi! I'm AJ, maker of Carrd and ... after 2.5M sites, $1M ARR, and a funding round, probably time for an AMA!
The traffic surge nearly killed the product. AJ's infrastructure wasn't built for this scale. In February 2021, already at $1M ARR, he raised $2M. Not because he needed money, but because he needed expertise. Rainfall Ventures connected him with AWS engineers who helped migrate 2.5 million sites to new infrastructure. He specifically chose hands-off investors who wouldn't pressure him to hire aggressively or change the product. He compared investor selection to dating: both sides need to be aligned on values.
Today, Carrd hosts over 4 million sites, generates roughly $2M ARR, and is run by a team of four people. The tech stack is almost aggressively simple: PHP, vanilla JavaScript, jQuery. No React, no framework. Sites compile to static HTML served from a CDN. Compute cost rounds to zero. AJ still hasn't spent a dollar on advertising. The product that was supposed to pay for coffee now serves more sites than most VC-backed competitors, built by a team you could fit in a sedan.