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10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

datocms.com

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Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#31

Post by pdyc »

kubb wrote: post #18
le-mark wrote: post #15

The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.

It’s funny because I have no concept of why this kind of infrastructure is needed and by whom. Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them. Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim.

> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.

I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#33

Post by steffoz »

arresin wrote: post #24
steffoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! It was never an all-in bet for us, so we never struggled too much tbh. It slowly grew inside our web agency as a part-time side-quest, and only when we reached an OK level of revenues that could feed our families it became a full-time job and an actual funded company.

Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.

infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#35

Post by jacquesm »

steffoz wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #14

That's excellent by any metric. Most larger successful companies have a very hard time consistently breaking the 200K / employee / year turnover level and this is 2.5 times that. On top of that they are indestructible, with that much left on the table a couple of years of solid saving and you can start thinking about much larger projects, and still without outside financing. 10 years is long and if we take the revenu…

Thank you! It was never an all-in bet for us, so we never struggled too much tbh. It slowly grew inside our web agency as a part-time side-quest, and only when we reached an OK level of revenues that could feed our families it became a full-time job and an actual funded company.

Ah, a spin out, ok, that makes good sense, and that helped you avoid a lot of the dangers that would have killed an entity all-in from day #1. More often than not that kind of pressure leads to sub-optimal decision making and you budded off in a nice and controlled way. Web agencies are pretty good as the basis for this kind of thing, I've seen it happen multiple times now. I think the reason is that you know exactly where the pain points of your customers are and that sets you up for productization. And in lean times you can't fall far because the agency customers will need to be served anyway.

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#36

Post by jacquesm »

steffoz wrote: post #33
arresin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.

infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)

I think it may well be still worth it to look back and note it down as much as possible and I'm sure that it will be interesting to many people.

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#38

Post by jacquesm »

steffoz wrote: post #19
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, the vast bulk of unicorn wanna-be's end up failing (sometimes failing upwards though) and then it is all for nothing. Aiming for the middle ground: reasonable growth, good financial strategies based on unit cost profitability and a very tight hand on the purse will get you a solid business that can serve as the jump off point for many other things on top of giving the founders a much better shot at fin…

To be fair, it's rarely all for nothing for what I hear. Secondary stock sales [1] are very common and allow founders to take some big chips off the table. To me, it is more a matter of keeping things simple, manageable, safe and more fun for how I like to work :) https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...

Sure, but your personal preferences have an outsized effect on your chances for success because they are very much aligned.

I know plenty of founders that gave it all and then some (including their health, their family relationships and in some cases their lives) and that ended up worse than the shape they were in when they started. So yes, you hear a lot of stories about secondary stock sales and so on but those are the exceptions and very much not the norm. That's just survivorship bias.

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#39

Post by switz »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #6
Doches wrote: post #4

> We're not bragging (okay, we're bragging a little) but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works. Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!

This is the way! As a fellow bootstrapper let me also add the infinite value of peace of mind. Your business is your own, and you can focus on earnings, quality of life, growth, what ever you like, without annoying VC:s and investors telling you what to do. As soon as you take in money, the businesses at some level, ceases to be yours. The only flaw is that with bootstrapping and one step at a time, it is more diffic…

Fellow bootstrapper checking in. Made an ardent but delicate decision in 2015 not to raise money and ten years later I'm chugging along full-time on my business. Infinitely glad to have chosen this path. It was the right one for me.

Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

#40

Post by embedding-shape »

sbarre wrote: post #28
steffoz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, that's exactly what we did. As a web agency, we tried every CMS out there and struggled with all of them for different reasons (quality, maintenance, pricing, scalability, development speed), so we built our own. The key thing is you need to genuinely identify with the people you're selling to. Without that connection, every doubt (and there will be tons) becomes nearly impossible to overcome.

To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s. Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product? It feels like the CMS market is p…

> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.

I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.

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