How we research, and why you can trust it
Most "founder story" content is two things at once: inspiring and useless. It tells you someone made millions, then leaves you with nothing you can actually do. OPC Stories exists to fix that — but only if the facts are real. Here is exactly how a case gets published.
Step 1 — Sourcing
Every case starts from public, traceable sources: founder dashboards, interviews, press coverage, or the product itself. We do not invent numbers, and we do not publish a case we can't source back to something a reader could find.
Step 2 — Confidence labels
Every revenue figure carries one of three labels, shown right on the page:
- Self-reported — stated by the founder (e.g. a public dashboard). Honest, but not audited.
- Press-reported — covered by a media outlet. Better, but still unverified internally.
- Independently verified — confirmed across multiple sources or via the live product. Rarest, strongest.
We deliberately avoid the word "proof" for money we haven't seen in a bank account.
Step 3 — Dissection, not transcription
A case study is not a biography. We extract the repeatable moves — positioning, distribution, pricing, and the mistakes — so you can apply them. If a story has a failure worth learning from, it gets its own section. The anti-patterns are the most valuable part.
Step 4 — What we refuse to publish
- Numbers with no source we can name.
- "Guaranteed income" or "get rich" framing. We cover real, varied outcomes — including the ones that failed.
- Financial, legal, or tax advice. We document what founders did; we are not your advisor. See our disclosures.
Our own bias, stated plainly
We cover solo founders disproportionately because (a) that's the audience, and (b) their stories are most actionable for a one-person reader. Cases with funding (like the Ben Broca study) are labeled so you don't mistake a $30M-backed operation for a bootstrap blueprint.