Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

scrapingbee.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 159 posts

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#71

Post by Zababa »

nrmitchi wrote: post #40
chrisan wrote: post #26

Earlier 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".

Bootstrapping is not a statement about difficulty, bootstrapping is a statement about where the money comes from. That's it.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#72

Post by robocat »

daolf wrote: post #44
czbond wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@Daolf - congrats on the building, definitely NOT easy to do. What growth metrics did Tiny look at? Did the investment come at a time when the business was needing to "survive, sustain, or grow"? [every business has all of those phases]

Thanks a lot. > What growth metrics did Tiny look at? I assume you mean during the application process. So they asked just the basic stuff, MRR, growth, churn. We were at $1k5 MRR when we applied and $3k when we got it. I think what worked for us during the process was that Kevin had been running a small Java web scraping blog + book at that time. > Did the investment come at a time when the business was needing to "…

> They allowed to make the transition and go full grow mode.

The point of bootstrapping is making the compromise where you trade a lower growth rate for the benefit of retaining 100% ownership of your business. Your statement is a VC funding model, even if the money is called seed and you are not trying to become a unicorn.

Your giving away equity for money is simply not bootstrapping. Calling your business bootstrapped is lying in my opinion. What I think doesn’t matter, but being deceitful is silently judged by others where their opinions do matter to you, and the consequences of that are usually invisible.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#73

Post by jillesvangurp »

Great pitch and inspiring story. I've been involved with a few startups that failed. So, I know a lot about humility and hard work. Basically, my first starup we were naive. It ended with an acquisition which was ultimately worth nothing. The startup that acquired us raised a lot but ultimately failed as well and I personally turned off the lights (by means of shutting down our AWS stuff). After that, I consulted for a while to make money and then got involved again with another startup. But this time with the wisdom of hindsight.

I've got a good feeling about my latest effort (tryformation.com) where I am the CTO. For the first time, I have a combination of talent around me, a market that is showing actual interest in what we do (and paying us), and a level of control over our product, tech, and road map that means it is really my job to not mess this up. It's still super risky but there's a good chance I can make it work this time. I rebooted the product (rebuilt it from scratch), I've defined our product and vision and took ownership of the product roadmap. And it's working. We are closing deals and getting positive feedback from our early customers. This year is critical for us.

Early revenue is super hard without significant funding. Accepting pizza money from some accelerator helps a little but it's really not about the money usually but about getting some coaching, advice, and building a network around your company of people that can help you. If you are doing SAAS, you need sales people. And not just any people but good ones. A warm introduction can make all the difference you need.

Of course the trick is picking the right accelerator. YC, Techstars (for which I have mentored), and a few others stand out as being awesome. In our case, we actually joined the Bosch Startup Harbour program in Berlin, which helped us build relationships with German industries. Some of those are now becoming customers and a few others might follow. So, good value for us. We did not give away equity and we did not receive a lot in terms of cash. But it helped us a lot.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#74

Post by moralestapia »

daolf wrote: post #11
capableweb wrote: post #7

Congratulations! 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…

>if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding

Yes. Yes, we do.

You didn't bootstrap, period.

Also, what a strange hill to die on ...

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#75

Post by encoderer »

sombremesa wrote: post #60
tr33house wrote: post #3

It'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!

Right, sure, silicon valley doesn't know how to turn a profit.

/s

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#76

Post by manmanic »

This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together:

Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.

Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/

Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:

Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/

Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#77

Post by no_wizard »

btown wrote: post #43
daolf wrote: post #11

Earlier 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-…

Why is that a problem? Bootstrapping is a privilege, just like raising any VC funding is, yet nobody is fighting to change the term for Venture Capital funded startups.

The meaning of which has been well established, both inside tech circles and outside, to mean starting a business without raising any outside capital.

Why do we want to suddenly stretch the meaning of bootstrap? The compelling story here would have been "how we created a SaaS business with 1M ARR with only seed funding", and I'd still have read it. That is something worth being proud of, why is bootstrap better?

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#79

Post by twox2 »

manmanic wrote: post #76

This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together: Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the ta…

It's good that there are businesses like this testing the legality of scraping. The notion that scraping should be illegal is absurd IMO.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#80

Post by babelfish »

niel wrote: post #5

Congratulations on your success, Kevin and team. I couldn't find this on your website - does Scrapingbee respect robots.txt directives, or is there any other method for a website owner to limit or even just slow down your scraping?

They almost certainly don't
Post reply on HN