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We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

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Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#41

Post by peteretep »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation. These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized busin…

> These advantages do not for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud

WeWork was a dud. That doesn’t show in any way that these advantages can’t work for commercial real estate, just that nobody’s done it yet.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#42

Post by randomsearch »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39
baxtr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

> We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.

Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#43

Post by bootstrapper101 »

newusertoday wrote: post #31
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?

I will try to answer multiple questions here because I am being throttled:

> How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.

We are highly automated. Very very few queries get through and they are contracted out.

> what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?

2 developers (I am 1 of them) and 1 person for everything else.

> Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one?

It's a large market with 20+ competitors. Because our operational costs are so low and we are highly automated we could take over big chunk of business from our competitors. Essentially the dynamic is like Altavista vs Google.

Our competitors sometimes do some really dark patterns. I am realizing that almost all companies do that (Google incognito tracking, Facebook charging kids in games etc). Somehow I can't get myself to do that. So I am thinking of moving to Saas so that I can deal with mature customers and ideally provide them value.

> What are your skillsets? How did you get there?

I am a programmer as my core skill. But I have also played product, marketing, sales, hiring through my career. To get good a these, I worked in my jobs as if I was the owner. That helped get me experience faster.

If people want to do a startup, best advice for them would be join a startup with good team at an early stage. Bonus points if that startup is in a space you like. Learn, make good friends and then then do your own startup.

I really recommend Naval's "How to get rich" podcast. It's as if he is talking about my life. He decided to move to more investing, but I still like building stuff myself.

> What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones? > How did you know when it was time to move on?

If I don't know how to keep growing the business, it's a dead-end and time to move on.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#44

Post by jacquesm »

warent wrote: post #14
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post? It's pretty off-putting and distracting from where there could be value.

> Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post?

Yes.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#45

Post by YetAnotherNick »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39
baxtr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

> Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives.

> I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.

I know it's your choice but haven't you still sacrificed your personal life, so why not try to become 10x?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#46

Post by bootstrapper101 »

randomsearch wrote: post #42
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

> We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?

Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids.

As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse.

My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier.

My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross »

peteretep wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation. These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized busin…

> These advantages do not for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud WeWork was a dud. That doesn’t show in any way that these advantages can’t work for commercial real estate, just that nobody’s done it yet.

Quite fair. Edited.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#48

Post by newbie578 »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39
baxtr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

Congrats to you for finally succeeding! Just that your way of climbing doesn't sound quite fun. Spending 7 years working 14 hours a day, full of stress, and fail 20 times straight? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. I wonder how many people are doing the same things you were doing and are still not successful...

I got a simple question, was it worth it and what would you change?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#49

Post by bootstrapper101 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #45
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

> Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. > I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. I know it's your choice but haven't you still sacrificed your personal life, so why not try to become 10x?

I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money.

1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face.

Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have one of the best customer service and refund policies across possibly all consumer internet companies. Our competitors have lot of dark patterns. To grow 10k, we might need to do shittier things which I don't want to.

I know there are lot of founders and executives out there who would be fine doing dark patterns for growth. But I am not and maybe that is my shortcoming and which is why I didn't want to grow in the Corporate ladder. If I own the company, I can have final say on these things.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#50

Post by newbie578 »

I got a question for which I don't see the answer in the article.

What about employee compensation? Is it just a fixed salary or? Since I do not see any mention of going public in the article, so I'm curious what is the motivation for employees.

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