He Mocked Up the App in PowerPoint, Sold Two Copies on Day One. Pocket Prep Now Has 8 Million Users.

Peter Murphy and his co-founders met working together at Lockheed Martin. None of them were developers. None were designers. They mocked up the first version of what became Pocket Prep in PowerPoint, pooled together less than $2,000, and launched in 2012, before “edtech” was even a category anyone was chasing.

Day one sales: two copies. Not two thousand. Two. No outside funding round backing the idea — just a bet that working adults studying for certification exams at night, squeezed between jobs and family, deserved a better tool than what existed at the time.

Pocket Prep has since helped more than 8 million learners prepare for over 140 certification exams across healthcare, IT, cybersecurity, finance, and the skilled trades. That’s an eight-million-person outcome that started with a PowerPoint mockup, no design team, and two sales on launch day.

It’s a useful reminder that the size of the check you start with has almost nothing to do with the size of the company you can eventually build, if the problem you’re solving is real enough.

Peter breaks down how he and his co-founders bootstrapped Pocket Prep from a PowerPoint mockup to millions of users on this episode of Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Peter Murphy on Apple Podcasts