Marc Köhlbrugge

Köhlbrugge is originally from the Netherlands and later moved to Portugal. On his personal website he says he has been making things on the internet for more than 20 years.⁠[1]

One of his early projects was PimpMyMSN, which offered emoticons, avatars and other extras for MSN Messenger users.⁠[2]

Köhlbrugge and two classmates built the iPad app Openmargin as their graduation project; it let readers of the same e-book exchange notes in the margins. He said the team wanted to turn the project into a real company.⁠[3][4]

In November 2010 the Openmargin team set a goal of 200 beta sign-ups by the end of the month but had only a few dozen. To win TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry coverage and drive traffic to Openmargin, Köhlbrugge spent a weekend building a TumblrTumblrTumblr is a blogging and social platform founded in New York by David Karp in 2007, built mainly around images, short posts, and reblogs. Yahoo acquired Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in 2013, after which it passed with Yahoo into Verizon’s ownership; in 2019 Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, acquired Tumblr from Verizon.Open the full entry site that collected “coming soon” pages of unlaunched startups. Because BetaList.com was taken, the site first used BetaLi.st. He also wrote a press release with PR.co, a press release service he had co-founded.⁠[4][3]

At 4:25 a.m. on December 10, 2010, he emailed TechCrunch with the subject line “Beta List goes live (overview of beta lists)”, without mentioning Openmargin. About 12 hours later TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis replied asking for more on the concept, and he described BetaList as “TechCrunch for startups that haven’t launched yet.”⁠[4]

TechCrunch published its article on BetaList on December 11, 2010, and Forbes covered it the same day. Köhlbrugge then made Openmargin BetaList’s top featured startup, and the traffic pushed Openmargin past its goal of 200 sign-ups.⁠[4]

Before WIP, Köhlbrugge made several attempts at a product for makers to share work in progress: Attaboy, an email-based product from February 2014, never got traction; a mobile app he mocked up the same month was never built; a version completed in February 2015 was never launched because he did not feel it was good enough; and a tool for getting feedback on sketches and wireframes, built in April 2016, was never launched after his motivation faded.⁠[5]

In September 2017 Pieter Levels suggested that he start a TelegramTelegramTelegram is a cloud-based messaging service founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov. Launched in 2013 and based in Dubai, it supports private conversations, groups, channels, bots and access across devices. Cloud chats and end-to-end encrypted Secret Chats use different architectures.Open the full entry group for the BetaList community. Within days members began sharing completed tasks, and Köhlbrugge built a bot and a simple website and renamed the chat, which became WIP. He describes WIP as “a social network for makers” where members share daily progress and keep each other accountable.⁠[5]

In August 2018 he said WIP had hundreds of makers working toward profitable businesses and a few thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue.⁠[5]

On June 17, 2014, Köhlbrugge recounted BetaList’s origins on his personal website. He wrote that BetaList had become a profitable business and had featured close to 4,000 startups, early ones including a pre-launch Pinterest as well as IFTTT, Fab and Mailbox.⁠[4]

A Dutch-language interview published on June 16, 2015, described Köhlbrugge as a designer and internet entrepreneur from Eindhoven. In it he called BetaList “een winstgevend bedrijf” (a profitable business) and mentioned his involvement in the local Eindhoven Startups Foundation; he also said he would like to work on artificial intelligence or space flight someday, but “niet voor nu” (not for now).⁠[6]

In a Mixergy interview released on June 24, 2015, he said he decided BetaList could stand on its own as a business when it reached about $1,000 in monthly revenue, and that after about three years of waiting he bought the BetaList.com domain for $1,000; the seller had first asked $3,000.⁠[3]

In the same interview he said BetaList was making “low six figures” in annual revenue, which he defined as $100,000 to $300,000, about 30 percent from advertising and about 70 percent from expedited reviews, with about a quarter million page views a month and a little over 10,000 subscribers.⁠[3]

In 2016 he launched BetaList Jobs, which crawled the web to aggregate job listings from startups around the world. In November 2016 he said the aggregator had fetched thousands of job listings, and that he had launched about a month after deciding the product was nearly ready, with only about a third of his planned launch checklist done.⁠[7]

In May 2017 Köhlbrugge wrote a Medium post on a better way to post Instagram photos to Twitter, which was read about 70,000 times. Taking this as a sign of demand, he spent just over a week of spare time building Tweet Photo, a Ruby on RailsRuby on RailsRuby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is an open-source, full-stack web application framework written in the Ruby programming language that builds database-backed web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and first publicly released in 2004, it is known for design principles such as “convention over configuration,” and companies including GitHub and Shopify use it in production.Open the full entry service that automatically posts Instagram photos to Twitter, starting on the $1 domain tweetphoto.icu before buying tweet.photo for $130.⁠[8]

Tweet Photo launched on December 12, 2018, was featured on BetaList and Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry, and had more than 100 accounts created on launch day. The “via tweet.photo” line on each tweet brought a steady stream of sign-ups. The service first offered a $19-a-year PRO plan that removed the branding, later changed to $5 a month.⁠[8]

In April 2020 Kevin, the owner of CreatorKit and Top Nine, offered to buy Tweet Photo, and they agreed on a price of $30,000: $10,000 upfront plus up to $20,000 paid out of revenue generated within 24 months of the acquisition. Tweet Photo had about $135 in monthly recurring revenue at the time of the sale. Köhlbrugge made the deal public on August 31, 2020.⁠[8]

In a retrospective marking BetaList’s tenth anniversary, Köhlbrugge said that over the decade BetaList had featured more than 15,000 startups, reviewed more than 70,000 submissions, welcomed more than 100,000 registered users and generated almost $1 million in revenue.⁠[9]

He recalled that when established companies asked how to get featured, he began selling ad slots at $50 a week and kept doubling the price until buyers said no, reaching $1,500 a week at the time of the retrospective; as a backlog of submissions built up and founders asked to be featured sooner, he went from doing free favors to charging $15, and gradually raised the price to $199.⁠[9]

He handed BetaList’s day-to-day operations to Rob Pish, freeing time for WIP and for Startup Jobs, a job board spun off from BetaList.⁠[9]

Köhlbrugge co-founded PressDoc, a service for creating press releases for the social web, with The Next Web and Stefan Borsje; the service was later renamed pr.co.⁠[3]

His personal website lists pr.co, the AI story generator Story AI and Tweet Photo as sold projects, and the image captioning tool Caption Cat and the product update tool Changelog as shut-down projects.⁠[2]

Besides BetaList, WIP and Startup Jobs, his current projects include Room AI, which generates interior designs with AI; AI Jobs, a job board for AI; Trademarc, which monitors trademarks across app stores and registries; Sessy, an open-source email observability tool for AWS SES; Yay, a photo app with AI filters; and Domain Book, a guide to getting good domain names.⁠[2]

In November 2026 the WIP homepage showed 3,851 makers in the community.⁠[10]

Personal website: https://marc.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/marckohlbrugge (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

BetaList: Official website: https://betalist.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

WIP: Official website: https://wip.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Startup Jobs: Official website: https://startup.jobs/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]