Congrats on achieving the $1m ARR milestone!
How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
51–60 of 159 posts
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#52It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR. ScrapingBee seems to be in the sweet spot where you don't have to work as hard to keep things running so it can be ran `forever` with a small team. This is no small feat and should be celebrated. All the best!
Boy this resonates. Not every business needs to "change the world" and IPO with a valuation of $10 Billion.
There are thousands of small businesses out there that provide a quality service, and generate good revenue, and pay their founders and employees amazing sums of money.
Love it.
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
"VC'd yourself" is the definition of bootstrapping. You either take money from someone else or you bootstrap it yourself.
It's kind of disingenuous to try to make this same comparison across different people. What if you borrow money from family in order to start your business? Are you no longer "bootstrapping"? What is Bezos decides he's bored, and wants to start something new. Really looking forward to seeing the "most successful bootstrapper of 2030" be Jeff Bezos with his self-funded $5B "startup".
I mean I understand the concepts you’re talking about, but maybe you need other terminology? Bootstrapping doesn’t make as much etymological sense if it also covers ”got some outside funding, but not too much”.
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#54Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct. > MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed > And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now
Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest. So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct. But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this. Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0). TinySeed works even if they…
I appreciate the honesty and the article, but it would have been just as interesting (and more authentic) if you would simply be honest:
“How we got to $1mm ARR with only a tiny seed round”.
Reading an article and immediately recognizing inconsistencies is an instant turn-off for me, and I assume many other readers. I don’t see what you think you’re gaining by being misleading with the headline.
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest. So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct. But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this. Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0). TinySeed works even if they…
To me, it's really important that the tech community define "bootstrapping" as no more and no less than "having a plan to reach profitability with total investment on the order of what a [not-outrageously-wealthy] group of founders might invest," and to frame it as a good thing . With TinySeed's round at "$120k for the first founder, $60k for the second, and $40k for the third" ( https://tinyseed.com/program#program-…
>, it's really important that the tech community define "bootstrapping" as [...] With TinySeed's round at "$120k for the first founder, $60k for the second, and $40k for the third" (https://tinyseed.com/program#program-faq) this is very much along those lines.
But when YC invested $120k for 7% equity, we typically didn't call all those startups like Dropbox/AirBNB etc "bootstrapped companies". And $180k for 2 founders is more than YC's previous terms.
>If one further gatekeeps the label with
It's unfair to call it "gatekeeping" rather than a case of confusing many readers with a headline that flips the meaning of "bootstrapping".
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#56Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct. > MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed > And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now
Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest. So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct. But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this. Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0). TinySeed works even if they…
Bootstrapping means you funded the entire thing out of pocket without any outside investment.
There's nothing bad/wrong about how you did it, but it's not bootstrapping. Saying it is makes it confusing for newbies which means they're more likely to be taken advantage of by VCs that realize they can market themselves as a "bootstrapper fund."
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So. On your own is just “VC’ed yourself” Precisely. If TinySeed has provided funds, it's no longer "VC'ed yourself", it's "VC'ed yourself + tiny seed from TinySeed". > Taking money from TinySeed is very different than taking money from VC. No one is arguing that TinySeed is just like any other VC. But instead that by accepting VC, you could no longer claim the business to be bootstrapped.
So if I start with $1M of my own money, is it bootstrapped? If family (with fuzzy conditions) ponied up $250k, is it bootstrapped?
$1M of your money? Yes
$250k from immediate family, if said fuzzy conditions don't confer any ownership or repayment? I'd say just barely yes (it's basically a gift to you at that point, which is then your money)
$250k from a third cousin in return for equity? No.
Being bootstrapped isn't an ungameable category, but it is a fairly unambiguous one IMO.
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#58Congratulations! Really wonderful to see small businesses and small teams succeed.
As an aside, I'm curious if anyone has thought through the ethics of scraping through rotating proxies. Clearly the scraped website doesn't want mass scraping to occur, hence the need for proxies in the first place. What are the strong arguments in favor or against this?
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#59When people ask me why I like being the founder of a company, I often reply with a small story: when we built our first saas for SMB, we billed .50€ per API call and we plugged those calls to a Slack bot. Man how great it felt in the firsts weeks when this bot would send a message around 20 times a day: the sound of finally having built something valuable that would generate value even if I'd be out of my computer, r…
Co-founder here, thanks for the kind words. I totally agree, the $1 dollar you make online is really special. I know that, as a computer engineer, it really made us shift our whole mindset about what we do. We thought all we were able to do was to write code for someone else, we discovered that we could also sell a product and make a living out of it.
Very cool. What's your backend stack written in if you're able to share?
Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
#60It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR. ScrapingBee seems to be in the sweet spot where you don't have to work as hard to keep things running so it can be ran `forever` with a small team. This is no small feat and should be celebrated. All the best!
> It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR
This is a blanket statement and it’s very wrong.
Know better than to look at revenue versus profit. Then again, Silicon Valley seems to have long since given up on that idea!