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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

#41

Post by rowls66 »

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.

My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.

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

#42

Post by steffoz »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
steffoz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Noted, thanks! :)

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

#43

Post by steffoz »

antonhag wrote: post #26

Congrats! Being able to run a nice company bootstrapped seems amazing. Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;) Your customers demand blazing-fast digital products, web standards are evolving at the speed of light, yet you rely on 15-years-old solutions like WordPress that force you to deliver heavy, low-quality user experiences. After all, you'll be there in only…

ahaha, true. on the other hand, wordpress is more 20 than 15 now :)

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

#44

Post by jwr »

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!

Fellow (solo) bootstrapper here. Congratulations to the author(s) of the article, and to all the other bootstrappers here. Remember, even if your business is smaller or doesn't have the incredible stellar growth numbers that these people posted, it's still YOUR BUSINESS. You are doing right by your customers (because they keep paying you), you have your own business, you do not depend on VCs, and you don't have to fake anything. This is incredibly liberating and should be cherished!

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

#45

Post by steffoz »

cwiggs wrote: post #30

Curious how you run things and have good work life balance for your employees, with so few people? Especially with the migration to k8s. K8s is much more complex than Heroku, some even say it requires an entire infra engineering team to manage.

In general, we try to keep things extremely simple. And then we simplify some more. If you're very strict on this basic rule and apply it at every level, from the start, you can go a long way with a small but stable team.

Regarding k8s: EKS is a very different beast compared to managing your own cluster in terms of complexity. We invested months into understanding a lot, yes, but then the day-to-day operations are not that heavy. At least, that's our opinion after 6 months; we'll see!

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

#46

Post by jwr »

rexreed wrote: post #7
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!

YES! I want to find more stories like this. Where can I find Bootstrappers or seedstrappers who have successfully scaled their companies past a few million in revenue with very small teams?

Why the "a few million in revenue" cutoff?

In a solo-bootstrapped business you don't need a few million (USD or EUR) in revenue to run a successful business and live a really good life. In fact, depending on where you mostly live, much less than a single million might be plenty.

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

#48

Post by steffoz »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #25
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.

I'd wager that most agency devs have wanted to do this too. CMS's never work the way you want them to as an dev. Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable. It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the…

That is a really nice comment, thank you a lot

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

#49

Post by anderspetersson »

cwiggs wrote: post #30

Curious how you run things and have good work life balance for your employees, with so few people? Especially with the migration to k8s. K8s is much more complex than Heroku, some even say it requires an entire infra engineering team to manage.

I would say k8s is a piece of software that enable teams to stay small. While the internals are insanely complex the developer experience is not that hard to learn.

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

#50

Post by asim »

Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.

Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches. Again not an advocate for the VC funding, but I'd taken even $500k these days to get something up and running as the cost of capital is basically nothing aka YC.

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