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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

#51

Post by steffoz »

embedding-shape wrote: post #40
sbarre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.

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

#52

Post by asdfman123 »

steffoz wrote: post #43
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 :)

`Yet you rely on ${new Date().getFullYear() - 2005}-years-old solutions like Wordpress`

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

#54

Post by yabones »

anderspetersson wrote: post #49
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.

I agree, though it takes some discipline to keep it simple and small. It can be really easy to let your clusters get huge, tools get complex, operator sprawl, etc. but keeping it simple and understandable is worth it in the long term.

The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.

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

#55

Post by OtherShrezzing »

>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.

This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.

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

#56

Post by steffoz »

asim wrote: post #50

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,…

> 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.

Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based startups so much. I'm not against VC funding per se. It's just important to recognize that it's not the only path and that there's nothing wrong if that route isn't for you, for any reason. You can be successful in other ways.

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

#57

Post by embedding-shape »

steffoz wrote: post #51
embedding-shape wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.

Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.

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

#58

Post by asim »

steffoz wrote: post #56
asim wrote: post #50

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,…

> 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. Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based sta…

Totally agree! Can't tell if I'm the go-go-go person anymore. So much stress...

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

#59

Post by steffoz »

jwr wrote: post #44
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 fa…

Totally! That’s the most important message. The numbers we’ve managed to achieve are beyond even the most optimistic outlook we had ten years ago, and we would have been (and were) genuinely happy and satisfied of what we were doing even with a tenth of the revenue. You definitely don't need this much to be proud of your company.

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

#60

Post by d--b »

steffoz wrote: post #34
d--b wrote: post #32

If anyone at datocms is reading this: I find your blog post incredibly off-putting.

Sorry to hear. Why exactly?

Well, for a start, you guys brag about having great margins, which is not a problem in itself, but as a potential customer, it gives me the impression that the product could be cheaper.

Then it's all self-congratulatory, with overemphasis that I find lacking taste. Just my personal opinion...

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