ProofStack research

Teardowns you can verify yourself

How profitable small software products actually win search, pricing and distribution. Every figure below can be reproduced by opening the same public pages we did.

• How a $100k+ MRR form builder wins search with zero blog posts

  Tally's sitemap has 421 URLs: 175 template pages, 198 help pages, zero blog posts, and its competitor comparison pages hidden inside the docs. A verifiable teardown of its SEO and AI-search playbook.

  2026-08-07

• Three Google Analytics alternatives, compared on public evidence only

  Plausible, Fathom and Umami run three entirely different playbooks: content-led with 104 blog posts, minimalist with no sitemap at all, and open source with 14 comparison pages. Pricing, disclosures and site structure, each verifiable yourself. We do not review UX; we compare evidence.

  2026-08-08

• What 42 audited pricing pages actually say

  Median first paid tier $19/mo, 34 of 42 with a free tier, and the most common thing behind the paywall is team seats, not features. Least quoted fact: only 14 of 42 have verifiable revenue disclosures. Every count clicks back to its cases.

  2026-08-14

• The winners without sitemaps: 24% of audited products skip SEO

  10 of 42 audited products have no sitemap at all, including some of the best-evidenced earners in the library. Stranger still: 3 of the 10 ship an llms.txt, and Readwise quietly added a 9-URL sitemap within two weeks — it lists /mcp and not a single content page.

  2026-08-22

• Two companies stream their revenue live: inside Ghost's $11.1M and Buffer's $24.5M public dashboards

  Ghost publishes its month-by-month ARR (2018–2026, including a visible full-year plateau in 2023); Buffer publishes down to the CEO's salary. A verifiable teardown of operating data itself as an acquisition asset.

  2026-09-02

• The $45M/year 'founder brand' company whose founder credits direct sales and hand-done migrations

  ConvertKit (now Kit) gets filed under 'founder brand growth'. But in the posts Nathan Barry wrote at the time, his own attribution is direct sales plus free concierge migrations: 71x in 14 months. Five first-party posts, verifiable line by line.

  2026-09-02

One new teardown ships each week. The underlying evidence lives in the case library.