Founder story / BetaList · WIP · Startup Jobs
MarcKöhlbrugge
Marc Köhlbrugge Built WIP After Years of Unshipped Precursors
Small public bets
The story in one line
He made the first public bet small enough to survive being wrong.BetaList began as a weekend publicity device. WIP emerged after years of overbuilt, abandoned precursors. Both exposed something useful before Köhlbrugge committed to a complete product.
Act one: the unread badge on the bus
On the bus home, Marc Köhlbrugge finally looked at his phone. The unread badge showed hundreds of messages. He thought he had been spammed. Instead, he later wrote, the inbox was filling with Twitter notifications for a weekend project he had built on Tumblr. TechCrunch had written about BetaList.
The feature appeared on 11 December 2010. Alexia Tsotsis described a minimal list of startups that had not launched yet, curated for people who wanted early access. The public artifact was real, but the motive behind it belonged to a different product.
Köhlbrugge and his collaborators were trying to recruit testers for Openmargin, an iPad app for exchanging notes inside ebooks. A coming-soon page was a weak press pitch, so he made something that could already be used. “It was really basic, but it served its purpose,” he wrote in his BetaList origin story, published on 17 June 2014. “The focus was on the featured startups, not on BetaList itself.”
In that retrospective, Köhlbrugge wrote that BetaList featured Pinterest before launch. He also named IFTTT, Fab and Mailbox among its notable early listings.
Once the TechCrunch traffic arrived, he put Openmargin at the top of the list. He says it carried the app past its target of 200 beta signups. Then the publicity device began attracting its own feedback. Köhlbrugge later said the app failed. BetaList stayed.
Act two: the serial non-shipper
The weekend story makes Köhlbrugge look like a natural shipper. His own history says otherwise.
In February 2014 he tried Attaboy, an email-based place for makers to share work and keep one another motivated. It found no traction. A mobile mock-up followed, but he did not build it. A year later he completed another version of the same idea and still did not release it. In April 2016 he built a related product for sharing sketches and mock-ups, lost motivation, and abandoned that too.
He named the pattern in a post on 23 January 2018: “serial non-shipper.” The cycle began with a quick prototype, expanded as features accumulated, and ended when somebody else released a simpler version. This was not a problem of technical ability. Each private iteration became harder to expose because more work made its shortcomings feel more expensive.
His diagnosis in “The history of WIP,” published 22 August 2018, was blunt: “My pitfall is over-engineering and running out of motivation before the product is ready to ship.” The remedy he gave himself was smaller scope and a willingness to look unaware of obvious shortcomings.
An earlier account of making and launching
Act three: the group moved first
The version that became WIP did not begin with the complete product he had repeatedly imagined. It began inside a tool people already used.
In September 2017, Pieter Levels suggested a Telegram group for BetaList. Members started sharing completed tasks. Köhlbrugge watched the behavior, built a bot and a simple website around it, then renamed the chat WIP. The order mattered: group, behavior, bot, site. Profiles and product pages came after the social act they were meant to support.
That sequence reversed his earlier attempts. Attaboy began with his conception of an accountability product. WIP began with people already making their work visible. A maker could name a concrete task, mark it complete, and let peers encourage, question, or help. The conversation exposed needs before Köhlbrugge committed to a larger interface.
The sequence is useful without turning it into a productivity promise. Members were already behaving this way, and he expanded the product around what they did. What followed was shaped by visible use rather than an imagined complete system.
Act four: persistence without attachment
Köhlbrugge did not turn two survivors into a promise that shipping guarantees success. In his 27 November 2018 essay, “Makers, don’t try to reverse-engineer success,” he said most of his products had failed and argued that the usual questions about winning products ignore the attempts that vanished.
His distinction was between push and pull. A weak idea, in his telling, requires its maker to keep asking for attention and clutching at polite feedback. A stronger one brings unsolicited use and questions. This is a founder’s heuristic, not a law. Distribution, an existing audience, novelty and selection effects can all look like pull. But it gives the small release a second purpose: it is cheap enough to stop.
“Persistence is not about sticking with what doesn’t work,” he wrote. “Persistence is continuously experimenting until you find something that does.” Small scope does not remove uncertainty. It reduces the cost of asking reality another question.
What the small artifact became
BetaList, WIP and Startup Jobs are the products Köhlbrugge foregrounds on marc.io today. His current biography says he is from the Netherlands and lives in Portugal. The same page describes somebody who still releases products often, not somebody who discovered one permanent answer.
That matters because his public projects page is a selected ledger of shipped work. It cannot provide the denominator for every idea, prototype or abandoned attempt. The polished portfolio shows what survived. His WIP history supplies some of what did not.
Across the two best-documented origins, the shared move is not simply “build in public.” BetaList was a useful publicity object. WIP formed around observed group behavior. In both cases, a small public artifact elicited information before a complete product existed. Visibility mattered because somebody could respond to something concrete.
Coda: one in the morning
At the end of his WIP history, Köhlbrugge did not offer a perfect launch ritual. He reported the conditions of publication instead.
“It’s 1am, I’m eating McDonald’s delivery, and making tons of grammar errors. Signing out.”
The sentence is untidy, late and already public. After years of waiting for a finished version, he left the errors where other people could see them and pressed publish anyway.
The 60-second summary
The pattern in one sentence: Köhlbrugge made the first public bet smaller, used response as information, and expanded only after people gave him something concrete to follow.
The playbook, if you want it. Start with the smallest artifact that lets somebody act, not the smallest slide deck that lets them imagine. Put it where the intended users already are. Watch behavior before adding structure. Treat questions, repeated use and unsolicited feedback as signals to investigate, not proof. Keep the first version cheap enough that stopping remains a real option.
What you cannot copy. BetaList had a TechCrunch opening that cannot be scheduled. WIP emerged from an existing BetaList community and a suggestion from Pieter Levels. Köhlbrugge also brought years of product work, distribution and abandoned experiments to each apparently simple release. The visible survivors do not reveal how many private attempts went nowhere.
The dated record
Openmargin needs testers
Köhlbrugge says the team is short of its beta signup goal and he begins building a different, publishable object to attract attention.
The BetaList pitch
His preserved origin account dates the short TechCrunch email to 4:25 a.m.
TechCrunch publishes
Alexia Tsotsis reports that BetaList curates startups before public launch.
Attaboy
An email accountability concept gains no traction; a mobile mock-up is not built.
Built, not released
Köhlbrugge later says an over-engineered iteration was completed but never felt ready to launch.
Another precursor stops
A related product for sharing work is built and abandoned after motivation fades.
The group becomes WIP
A BetaList Telegram group starts sharing completed tasks; Köhlbrugge adds a bot and simple site.
The bottom-up account
UI Breakfast publishes Jane Portman’s long interview with Köhlbrugge about executing product ideas.
The failed versions become a history
He publishes the WIP chronology and names over-engineering as his recurring pitfall.
Persistence gets a stopping rule
His essay argues for continued experiments rather than attachment to an unresponsive product.
The current home
Marc.io foregrounds BetaList, WIP and Startup Jobs and says he now lives in Portugal.
Sources and evidence notes
How to read the record. TechCrunch independently anchors BetaList’s public launch on 11 December 2010. The publicity motive, bus scene, Openmargin result and early-listing examples come from Köhlbrugge’s retrospective account. His account says BetaList featured Pinterest before launch and names IFTTT, Fab and Mailbox, but Streakr did not independently establish the pre-launch status of those listings. The WIP origin and failed precursors come from his 2018 history and the interviews preserved in the source record. Those sources establish the interface and his account of its origin, not that posting tasks causes productivity or profit. Public WIP counters are moving and inconsistent across pages, so this edition does not use them as measures of productivity, retention or business performance.
What we could not verify
- A complete relevant X history. The archive review recovered only a small readable portion of the indexed posts, enough to support his small-scope rhetoric but not enough to rule out missing context.
- Two long-interview transcripts were recovered, but neither could be verified to quotation standard. The UI Breakfast machine transcript contains recognition errors, and the Dutch Fast Moving Targets transcript is too unreliable for English quotation. This edition quotes neither.
- Independent reporting on later WIP operations, including membership, retention, moderation, revenue or outcomes. No WIP revenue claim appears here.
- The reported Openmargin signup result or BetaList’s famous pre-launch listings from a source independent of Köhlbrugge.
- A clean lifetime attempt count. His public project ledger deliberately excludes unshipped work.
Image note. The hero is a cropped historical photograph of Marc Köhlbrugge made by Guido van Nispen in 2015, not a current portrait. Streakr center-cropped the original to 16:9. Source: Guido van Nispen, “Marc Köhlbrugge,” Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
- Marc Köhlbrugge, “How I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup,” 17 June 2014. First-party origin account for the weekend build, pitch, bus scene, Openmargin motive, reported result and early-listing examples. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Marc Köhlbrugge, “The history of WIP,” marc.io/the-history-of-wip, 22 August 2018. First-party chronology of Attaboy, later precursors and WIP’s emergence. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Alexia Tsotsis, “Betali.st Gives Early Adopters A Heads Up,” TechCrunch, techcrunch.com/2010/12/11/betali-st-gives-early-adopters-a-heads-up, 11 December 2010. Contemporaneous independent launch record. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Jane Portman, “Episode 90: Executing on Product Ideas with Marc Köhlbrugge,” UI Breakfast, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-90-executing-on-product-ideas-with-marc/id939175693?i=1000399453217, 11 January 2018. Long interview and preserved audio; machine transcript used for context, not direct quotation. Accessed 15 August 2026.
- Growth Tribe, “The Future Of Marketing: Pieter Levels, Marc Köhlbrugge, Jim Groenen & David Arnoux Discuss,” YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=pGzWotyveks, 15 October 2016. Period panel embedded above; no transcript quotation used. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Marc Köhlbrugge, “How to be a serial non-shipper,” marc.io/how-to-be-a-serial-non-shipper, 23 January 2018. First-party description of the overbuilding cycle. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Marc Köhlbrugge, “Makers, don’t try to reverse-engineer success,” marc.io/makers-dont-try-to-reverse-engineer-success, 27 November 2018. First-party essay on survivorship bias, product pull and persistence. Accessed 14 August 2026.
- Marc Köhlbrugge, marc.io homepage and projects page, accessed 15 August 2026. Current identity, location and selected product portfolio.
- WIP profile, statistics and calendar pages, accessed 14 August 2026. Owner-operated moving counters excluded from outcome claims.
- Fast Moving Targets, “Marc Köhlbrugge: ‘Met Betalist kun je de de startups van morgen vandaag ontdekken’,” YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=C23ZOBh8jS8, 28 October 2015. Dutch long interview; machine transcript not used for quotation. Accessed 15 August 2026.
- Local X archive review, completed 15 August 2026. Incomplete capture; limitations stated above.