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We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

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Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#31

Post by newusertoday »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#32

Post by baxtr »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations?

25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#33

Post by JumpCrisscross »

eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation.

These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized businesses, if for nothing else than resilience and local optimisation.

My worry is the advantage of centralising customer data is too general. That lets a single entity exert broad scaling advantage, which is scary and inefficient. I increasingly think this should be a measure for antitrust enforcement: does a company possess an edge that gives it a competitive advantage in almost any market it tries to compete in. If so, it’s an economic nerve bundle and at the very least needs to be regulated.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#34

Post by tebbers »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #15
warent wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post? It's pretty off-putting and distracting from where there could be value.

I am really sorry it came that way. It's been a long day. Thought this was a good opportunity to share my learnings and answer any questions. If there is any way I could help answer any question, I would love to!

Don't apologise. I didn't get a humblebrag tone from your posts at all.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#35

Post by jbverschoor »

eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

Lifestyle businesses are something demonic in the valley

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#36

Post by MangoCoffee »

eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

there are ton of successful business outside of silicon valley but Wonder kids like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) make better headline to sell news.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#37

Post by navanchauhan »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #24
breck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any small public companies (<50 employees) you admire?

I don't know employee strength of many companies. Some companies which feel relatively small that I like are: 1Password (agilebits), Protonmail, Little Snitch (Objective Development). PS: I am getting throttled by HN algorithms. If someone can help get me unthrottled I will get around to answering all the questions.

That is probably because you have a new account.

Try contacting hn on their email.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#38

Post by bootstrapper101 »

practicalpants wrote: post #19
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

Process question: What specifically would you do to get early customers or to market the mvp? How did this change over the 25 attempts? What was your criteria for "this one has failed let's do another one"?

My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow.

I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this.

The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas.

I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users.

Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like:

1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem)

2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start.

3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers.

4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost

5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing

There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces.

Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#39

Post by bootstrapper101 »

baxtr wrote: post #32
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Timeline:

7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money

3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money

4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit.

It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas.

I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work for someone else. That kept me going.

We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#40

Post by akritrime »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

What are your skillsets? How did you get there?
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