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Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
Our startup ( https://serpapi.com , our canny: https://forum.serpapi.com ) is a happy customer of them and it has been instrumental to be able to collect issues from our clients. The alternative was basically a GitHub repo just to collect feedback but Canny is sooo much better.
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To be honest, 3.5 years to hit 1M ARR is pretty impressive if you are bootstrapped. Were they bootstrapped ?
Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
> I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs. No, I would say almost everyone who bootstraps either goes into debt or uses savings to fund the business, hoping to break even and make a profit eventually. If you can get enough revenue from the first day to cover cost of living for even 1 person, that's a good start, but unusual. Bootstrappers who start with an existing client or product that's alread…
At some point your access to capital dries up when banks see your level of risk increase. You might be able to survive moderate losses for a year or two and cover it with personal debt financing, depending on how much money and access to capital you have personally, but 3.5 to 4 years covering losses with personal debt is REALLY pushing it. You're most likely talking several hundred thousand dollars at that point even for a small startup.
And $1M ARR is only enough to support a team of 9 if the average salary being paid is around $50k-$55k/year (or if 2 or more people aren't even drawing a salary). Which makes sense because, in their blog, they describe hiring someone for marketing that was much less "senior" - i.e. cheaper - and not being happy with it. Taxes, fees, registrations, legal/accounting, benefits (if any), insurance, hosting, technical infrastructure, etc. can easily eat up over $300k/yr for a team of 9 - not including direct payroll.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
Congratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :) I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out.…
Thanks so much for being a customer! And yeah, it always feels bad to write that "we got lucky", as it isn't really that repeatable/helpful. But it's true.
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> I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs. No, I would say almost everyone who bootstraps either goes into debt or uses savings to fund the business, hoping to break even and make a profit eventually. If you can get enough revenue from the first day to cover cost of living for even 1 person, that's a good start, but unusual. Bootstrappers who start with an existing client or product that's alread…
Having done the same thing myself (bootstrapped a services company from $0 to over $8M/year in revenue in 5 years and grown a SaaS product from $0 to ~$800k ARR in 16 months completely bootstrapped), you can go into debt for a short time while bootstrapping, but generally not 3.5+ years unless you are independently wealthy or have a retirement nest egg you've been saving for a few decades you're prepared to liquidate…
That’s an amazing accomplishment.
Would you mind sharing,
- how many employees you have
- biggest driver to your revenue success
- biggest mistake the company made
- anything else you might find of interest to share
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.