I am, but I'm taking my bare-minimum salary at this point (thank god for my lovely wife). We're actually doing quite well money-wise, but I just keep reinvesting everything we make.
Who is living off their startup fulltime?
21–30 of 190 posts
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#22TinkerCAD (http://tinkercad.com). Self funded and in soon-alpha mode, 3 FT founders. Quit Google a few months ago after five great years at the place.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#23Left full time employment two years, was profitable within three months, now employ three full time staff and profits into seven figures. The best move I ever made.
Care to tell your story?
His site is in his profile. You can probably surmise at least a portion of his story from that.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#24Yes. Android app sales.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#25ParkWhiz ( http://www.parkwhiz.com ) is fully bootstrapped and paying full-time salaries to both founders. It took us 3 years of being ramen-profitable to get to that point, though.
What a great concept!
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#26Living full time off 2 startups, but they are 6 and 2 years old so I'm not sure if they still qualify as "startups".
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#27TinkerCAD ( http://tinkercad.com ). Self funded and in soon-alpha mode, 3 FT founders. Quit Google a few months ago after five great years at the place.
If you're self funded and not even launched yet you're not actually living off the business. I'm not having a go at you or anything, just saying thats what the question was.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#28Left full time employment two years, was profitable within three months, now employ three full time staff and profits into seven figures. The best move I ever made.
"Shop More, Pay Less! Use a Promotional Codes every time you Buy Online."
is that an intentional mistake for SEO purposes?
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#29TinkerCAD ( http://tinkercad.com ). Self funded and in soon-alpha mode, 3 FT founders. Quit Google a few months ago after five great years at the place.
I cant wait to get my alpha invite for TinkerCAD!
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#30When I started out in 1999 my business partner and I took $1,200 and turned it into $1M (revenue) in 12 months...100% online sales. We started out buying 3 beat up laptops, fixing them and selling them. Within 6 months we were buying containers (semi-truck loads) of off-lease laptops and shipping up to 150 a day. 60-70% profit margins. We grew for a couple of years and then we ran into our first wall.
By 2003, our product commoditized and margins started shrinking fast. All of a sudden the used laptop business turned into the used VCR business. New laptops were cheap and our margins went from 60-70% to 5-10%. Our world was changing and we needed to pivot fast. We had to lay off our entire staff, sell our office building (yea, we bought our own office building) and start over...but not from scratch.
During the good times, we would always throw new ideas around. If we agreed that an idea was solid, we would build it out and let it sit on the back burner. When the time came, we were able to jump into a new project that was already setup and ready to go. We just needed to start executing.
Fast forward to today. Our website (services, subscriptions, advertising) currently does about $400k annually (up from $250k last year) with a substantial profit margin, zero debt and miles of growth in front of it. It has been WAY harder this time around, but we are building something much more substantial.
While my business partner and I whole-heartily believe we are about to enter a hockey stick phase of growth, we do have a couple of ideas built out and simmering on the back burner...just in case.
tl;dr I have been bootstrapping and making my living online since 1999.