Dru Riley

Dru Riley is a self-taught developer turned founder best known for Trends.vc, a weekly newsletter that breaks down one emerging market or business idea at a time for tens of thousands of founders. After graduating from Florida State University in 2012, Riley learned Ruby on Rails, worked as a software and big-data engineer in Atlanta, and in 2017 left that job to run a small consulting company and take a self-described mini-retirement of reading, travel and Jiu Jitsu.

By 2020 Riley was ready to build again. Trends.vc came after a failed app and a moderately successful book: a project called StrongStack pivoted into SaaSReport, which evolved into the Trends reports first published weekly on Riley's personal site. The free reports grew past 50,000 subscribers, and the paid tier, Trends Pro, combines in-depth reports with a community, daily standups and masterminds. Riley has written that it passed 1,000 paying members within about ten months.

Trends.vc has stayed bootstrapped, and Riley has written publicly about turning down venture capital. Several products now run in parallel, including HeadsUp, a competitor monitoring tool, and Multi, which turns existing content into YouTube videos. Riley spent around five years as a digital nomad before settling down.

Riley is also known for documenting habits and experiments in public: a daily essay on druriley.com becomes an episode of the Dru's Notes podcast, and the writing has been collected into short books on habits, experiments and personal rules.