Replit’s Path to Product-Market Fit—The $1 Billion Side Project
In the startup world, we often hear stories of founders who’ve dreamt of starting a company—any company—since childhood, with big business ambitions stemming from their days of running a lemonade stand. This is not one of those stories.
Amjad Masad’s founder journey began instead with a singularly focused vision: bringing the power of software creation to everyone. Leading a business was more of a means to that end. “I always was attracted to the entrepreneurship track, but I’ve always ultimately been guided by my worldview when it came to creating technology,” Masad says.
He started with the premise that coding should be as simple as opening up a new tab in a browser. That might not seem all that groundbreaking in 2024, in an era when LLMs can now write code for you. But while collaborative, web-native tools like Google Docs emerged in the late 2000s, real-time collaborative coding in a web browser was still not widely available for a surprisingly long time.
It certainly wasn’t available back in 2008, when Masad was a computer science student. If developers wanted to work together on a project, they typically needed access to the same physical machine. It made partnering on developer projects nearly impossible with anyone who wasn’t in your immediate vicinity — and forget about working with someone on the other side of the world.
