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Method and sources

What each number on 1M.chat is, where it comes from, and what it does not tell you.

Where the list of businesses comes from

The list of 3,149 businesses comes from Starter Story, which publishes founder interviews and business profiles. We use it as a list of businesses to look at. 2,566 entries have a founder interview; the rest are profiles that Starter Story compiled from public sources.

Three kinds of fact, three kinds of source

  • What a business sells, who buys it and what it charges come from the business's own website. For case pages we fetched each site on 2026-09-30 and kept the exact wording behind every fact.
  • Revenue, team size, start cost and the founder's own account come from the founder interview, and we say so. Every figure carries the interview date and a link to the interview. It is what the founder said then, not current revenue.
  • Starter Story estimates (on business profiles without an interview) are always labelled “estimate” and never used in medians, shares or case pages.

How case pages are made

Each case starts from a fact pack: the facts quoted from the business's website, the founder's interview, and our comparison figures for the same industry. A writer drafts the page from the fact pack only, and a second automated review checks every number and claim against it before the page can go live. The at-a-glance card is filled straight from the fact pack, not from the draft.

How the data pages are grouped

Industries, business models and growth channels are our own groupings. Industry and business model were assigned by a classification pass over each business's description; growth channels combine the channels listed on Starter Story with what founders said worked in their interviews. Medians and shares use founder-reported revenue only. Groups with fewer than 12 founder-reported revenues do not get their own page.

What the numbers cannot tell you

Founders chose to be interviewed, usually once things were going well, so this is not a random sample. The figures show real outcomes and how specific businesses got there. They are not a forecast of what any new business will make, and nothing on this site is financial or business advice for your situation.

Corrections

If a business has changed, closed or a fact is wrong, ask in the chat and mention the page; we check it against the business's own site and update the page with the date.