Short interviews with people building in public on π. What they made, what it earns, and how they got there.
Turns a photo of your bookshelf into a lending library your friends can borrow from.
Shelfie started as a joke between two people who kept lending each other books and forgetting. Mira photographed her shelf, ran it through an OCR pipeline over a weekend, and posted the result. The thread did 400k views. Eighteen months later it pays her rent.
What does Shelfie actually do?
You photograph a shelf. It reads the spines, builds a catalogue, and gives you a page your friends can browse and request from. The whole thing is one photo and a link β I refuse to add an "add book" form.
Where did the first hundred users come from?
The original thread, entirely. I replied to everyone who asked for it with a link to a Tally form. I did that for nine days straight and it was the highest-leverage thing I have ever done.
When did it stop being a side project?
When a school librarian in Oregon emailed asking for fifty seats. That was the first time someone wanted it for a reason I hadn't imagined, and it made me think the surface was bigger than my friends' apartments.
I spent four months on features nobody asked for because they were more fun than talking to people.
What's the part you got wrong?
Pricing. I charged $3 for a year because I was scared. Moving to $4/month lost me 60% of accounts and tripled revenue in a week. The people who left were never going to be customers.
What are you doing next?
Shared shelves for book clubs, and an export so nobody feels locked in. If Shelfie disappears tomorrow I want everyone to walk away with a CSV of their library.
Every find auto-renders an OG image from the profile data, so the π post is a byproduct of publishing β not a second job.
Find #063 β Mira Rautio (@mirabuilds)
She photographed her bookshelf, shipped the OCR over a weekend, and now 1,140 people run lending libraries on it.
$8,400 MRR. Solo. No funding.
Full interview β
founderfinds.lol/mira-rautio
The number is the hook, the person is the story, the link is the payoff. Tagging the founder gives them a reason to quote-tweet β that's the whole distribution loop.
Three flat spot inks on paper stock, overprinting where they cross. It reads playful like Unfair without copying its lavender-and-blue, and the print metaphor justifies the numbered "issue" framing.
Every founder gets a permanent number and a date. That's what makes it a series you follow rather than a directory you skim β and it gives you something to post on a schedule.
Bricolage Grotesque for headlines, Newsreader for interview prose, DM Mono for handles, MRR and labels. Numbers always in mono so they line up and read as data, never decoration.
Cards lead with the face and handle; the product sits below a dashed rule. A listicle leads with the product. The MRR sticker sits slightly off-axis so it reads as applied, not printed.
Collections at the top, filter chips by MRR and team size, a three-up grid below. The playfulness lives in the ink and the tilt, never in the information architecture.
The find card is sized for the site and for a 16:9 π image. Publish once and the post renders itself, which is the only way 2β3Γ/week survives past month two.