He turned a video call into a 7-figure business

Most businesses start with a pitch deck, a business plan, or at least a rough roadmap. Taylor Jacobson's started with two guys on a video call, trying not to let each other down.

In late 2015, Taylor was a life coach running a men's support group. One of the members, Jake, was stuck. He had an important investor deck to write and kept avoiding it. Taylor suggested something simple: get on a call and just work together, side by side.

They worked for two hours. It felt completely different from working alone.

That single session planted a seed. Within a day, Taylor saw the bigger picture: what if anyone could find a working partner like that, anytime, on demand? He sat with the idea for six months before a friend pushed him over the edge: "The way you talk about this, I think you'll regret it if you don't do it."

He went all in. Focusmate now brings in 7-figure annual recurring revenue.

The model is straightforward. You book a session on Focusmate, get matched with an accountability partner, and join a video call. In the first minute, you each state what you plan to work on. Then you mute your mics and work quietly until a bell signals the end. You check in briefly and go your separate ways.

It sounds almost too simple. But for hundreds of thousands of people, it's the only thing that has actually worked for them.

The platform is free for up to three sessions per week. A paid plan runs $12 a month or $96 a year. Members are in every country, and the platform has hosted over 13 million sessions. Seven members have logged more than 10,000 hours each. One pair, from India and Spain, have shared over 5,000 sessions together.

The first version of Focusmate was a Facebook group called "Procrastination Blasters." No product. No code. Just a group where people posted the time they wanted to work and shared their Skype handles in the comments.

When Taylor decided to build something real, he didn't know how to code. So he patched it together: ScheduleOnce for booking, Google Sheets as a database, and Zapier to connect everything to Gmail and Google Calendar. It worked well enough to prove there was real demand.

His technical co-founder Mike joined in October 2016, and they shipped the first real version of Focusmate that November. Today, about 20 different tools power the platform.

The lesson here is worth holding on to: you don't need a polished product to validate an idea. You need enough structure to see if people show up.

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Most of Focusmate's growth came from word of mouth, and Taylor didn't force it. In the early days, he did some guerrilla outreach on Facebook and Reddit to attract the first 300 users. After that, the community took over.

When someone posted on Reddit about struggling to focus, a Focusmate member would jump in and recommend it. Press coverage worked the same way. Every meaningful feature story came from a reporter who was already a user, or who knew someone who was.

There's a reason for that: Focusmate is hard to explain in a sentence. You can't fully convey why working silently on a video call with a stranger makes you more productive. It touches on behavioral psychology, social accountability, and human nature. People have to experience it before they understand it, and once they do, they want to tell others.

That's the most durable kind of growth there is.

Taylor is direct about this: if you can build community into your product, not just around it, you should.

For Focusmate, the community is the product. People don't just use it; they feel like they belong to it. That changes everything. When the team hires, they pull from a pool of people who already understand what they're building. When they make a mistake, users give them grace because they feel invested. When someone considers canceling, the relationships they've built inside the platform are a reason to stay.

That kind of loyalty can't be bought through ads.

In 2020, Taylor's health took a serious turn. He went from being involved in every part of the business to operating at roughly 10% of his previous capacity.

It forced a shift that turned out to be valuable. Before getting sick, Taylor had his hands in everything and liked it that way. Being sidelined meant he had no choice but to trust his team. What he discovered was that someone on his team was better than him at nearly everything that needed to be done.

The business responded. They documented their processes, built more structure, and became less dependent on Taylor being in the room. That clarity stuck. The company still benefits from those systems today.

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Taylor has watched the same mistake play out repeatedly: founders fall in love with their idea and skip the steps that would reveal whether it actually solves a real problem.

Surveys are one of the biggest traps. Asking users "which feature do you find valuable?" or "how much would you pay?" gives you what people think they'd do, not what they'd actually do. People want to be helpful, but they genuinely don't know their own behavior well enough to tell you the truth.

A better approach is to ask open-ended questions about the problem: What have you tried so far? How did it go? How much did you spend on it? That surfaces real behavior and real spending, which are your first honest data points. And when you present an offer, the only real signal is whether someone pays. Intention is noise; money is signal.

Taylor says he had to get this wrong multiple times before it really landed.

For 2026, Focusmate's focus is on cash flow and profitability, which opens the door to real experiments in growth. The longer-term vision is to turn Focusmate into a suite of products, so that no matter where someone is starting from, there's a way in.

The goal Taylor keeps coming back to: members should feel like they can bootstrap their way to a productive day, no matter what's going on in their lives.

You can follow Taylor on LinkedIn and X, and try Focusmate for free.

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