> We spent the winter prototyping (experimenting with everything from bare metal to alternative PaaS providers — some of which shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty
mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?
10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
91–100 of 132 posts
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#92Congratulations on the success - you’re rightly proud, and that amount of cashflow brings real stability to owners and employees. I’m a former VC, and a former CMS company founder (late 1990s for the CMS side, competing with Genuity for instance), and I’m impressed at your margins and success delivering CMS tools, but I think you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and although you don’t realize it, you’re adding…
> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table 100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me. > you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy. There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place... > I…
Fellow bootstrapped founder for 8 years here, and I love and agree with your responses here.
Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.
VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.
There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#93I've been using Dato for years for private projects (would love a Hobby tier ;) ) and have been impressed with it from the start. Hearing that Dato and the people behind it are thriving makes me very happy! A success that's well deserved! :-D
Same here. Been with them since the beginning (or what felt like the beginning) and have always been impressed with their constant drive to get out new features and make sure their core stuff is still rock solid.
Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Some (more niche) industries/products/etc require larger margins to be able to exist. Without scale, they need to sometimes charge more.
It's the classic single gas station in the middle of nowhere argument. Without volume, they can't reasonably survive without charging more per unit - if competition shows up, one of them will inevitably go out of business due to the reduced margins.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#95I have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out.
I think you should create a bootstrapped business in established domain. In this case it is CMS, it could be very specific domain like network security, ci/cd, paas etc. Where VC is not pouring money and they think it is not forward looking, your alpha of building a big bootstrapped business is huge. Another key thing is that you should have the muscle to generate and collect revenue with discipline. If the revenue cycle is off you have trouble as a bootstrapped org.
I would use AI but not build an AI bootstrapped started business at this moment in time as there is huge growth capital invested in the market. But theres always an exception for eg. Midjourney et al. But thats that.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#96Congratulations on the success - you’re rightly proud, and that amount of cashflow brings real stability to owners and employees. I’m a former VC, and a former CMS company founder (late 1990s for the CMS side, competing with Genuity for instance), and I’m impressed at your margins and success delivering CMS tools, but I think you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and although you don’t realize it, you’re adding…
> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table 100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me. > you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy. There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place... > I…
All points well taken for sure. I especially like 'too small to trigger anyone' as an appealing defensive strategy. But I'm not sure you're too small to matter, even now. Hopefully that's received as good news :)
As a thought experiment, I just googled up small Italian tech companies that are publicly traded, and found, for example, DHH - an Italian hosting and content services company trading on Borsa Italiana (Growth I presume, it's a very small company) - earnings of 3.7m euros right now on a slow growing ~30m+ in revenue, market cap of 110m or so as far as I can tell. Were they to add 3.5m in net income to their company, their market cap would likely push to 150+m -- they'd have doubled their earnings. So, it might be worth 50+mm to them (or quite possibly a lot more if they could pair that with some growth and more exploitative margins) to pick this niche up.
To be clear, I wasn't pushing you toward a hyper growth strategy; it wouldn't suit you, and I think the CMS market probably isn't suitable in any event, even if you wanted to.
But, maybe a way to think of it is this, while there is risk in any strategy, it's worth minimizing the risks of any chosen strategy as part of your responsibility to your stakeholders (employees, family, shareholders, customers, self -- choose your preferred order).
In this case, if I were on your board, knowing the infinitely small amount I do about you guys, I'd probably suggest you at least have a structured growth plan in place -- that is, have growth targets, understand how to drive them, and assess success as you go. Nothing about that implies accidental enshittification or cultural rot; just managing this aspect of your business as well. If you haven't been doing that so far, when/if you need these skills, you'll be glad you have them. In the interim exercising them gets you more control of your destiny, whether that's aimed at getting everybody more time off for things that matter or cash or hitting the next 'stable' size of organization -- it's more that the tool is a useful one to develop.
As far as deciding what to do - always the founder's curse/blessing! I'm on the side of developing as much of a toolbox as possible, it just adds optionality. Keep it up!
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#97> 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!
What you dont see is the pain behind the scenes of a bootstrapped org. It always looks rosy outside.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Fellow small business owner here. Just as a reminder, discussing any successful (where successful is defined as not failed) business is a lesson in survivorship bias. Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years.
> Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years.
I hear this all the time with variations to the number of years, which makes me suspect it isn’t true.
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#99That’s only 50k euros per employee if taking 650k per year. What am
I missing?
Re: 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Revenue isn’t the correct metric for what the grandparent wants to measure to begin with.