> 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!
Fellow (solo) bootstrapper here. Congratulations to the author(s) of the article, and to all the other bootstrappers here. Remember, even if your business is smaller or doesn't have the incredible stellar growth numbers that these people posted, it's still YOUR BUSINESS. You are doing right by your customers (because they keep paying you), you have your own business, you do not depend on VCs, and you don't have to fake anything. This is incredibly liberating and should be cherished!
Totally! That’s the most important message. The numbers we’ve managed to achieve are beyond even the most optimistic outlook we had ten years ago, and we would have been (and were) genuinely happy, satisfied, and proud of what we were doing even with a tenth of the revenue.
This is the way! As a fellow bootstrapper let me also add the infinite value of peace of mind. Your business is your own, and you can focus on earnings, quality of life, growth, what ever you like, without annoying VC:s and investors telling you what to do.
As soon as you take in money, the businesses at some level, ceases to be yours. The only flaw is that with bootstrapping and one step at a time, it is more difficult to reach the unicorn-level, but as long as you are fairly successful and don't have infinite cravings and desires in terms of the life you want to live, the bootstrapping way is _the_ way.
Fellow bootstrapper checking in. Made an ardent but delicate decision in 2015 not to raise money and ten years later I'm chugging along full-time on my business. Infinitely glad to have chosen this path. It was the right one for me.
Unicorn-level sounds extremely stressful, happy to pass the burden to someone else. I seriously can't imagine a sane lifestyle that requires more money than what we already have.
Not only that, the vast bulk of unicorn wanna-be's end up failing (sometimes failing upwards though) and then it is all for nothing.
Aiming for the middle ground: reasonable growth, good financial strategies based on unit cost profitability and a very tight hand on the purse will get you a solid business that can serve as the jump off point for many other things on top of giving the founders a much better shot at financial independence. This is all a variation on the risk/reward theme.
To be fair, it's rarely all for nothing for what I hear. Secondary stock sales [1] are very common and allow founders to take some big chips off the table. To me, it is more a matter of keeping things simple, manageable, safe and more fun for how I like to work :)
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 the exceptions and very much not the norm. That's just survivorship bias.
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?
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.
Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.
Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches. Again not an advocate for the VC funding, but I'd taken even $500k these days to get something up and running as the cost of capital is basically nothing aka YC.
> Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches.
Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based startups so much. I'm not against VC funding per se. It's just important to recognize that it's not the only path and that there's nothing wrong if that route isn't for you, for any reason. You can be successful in other ways.
That's excellent by any metric. Most larger successful companies have a very hard time consistently breaking the 200K / employee / year turnover level and this is 2.5 times that. On top of that they are indestructible, with that much left on the table a couple of years of solid saving and you can start thinking about much larger projects, and still without outside financing.
10 years is long and if we take the revenues as linearly changing over time and the costs growing roughly linear along with it then years two and three must have been quite difficult, expectations need to be met but the money wasn't really there yet. But now there is.
Thank you! It was never an all-in bet for us, so we never struggled too much tbh. It slowly grew inside our web agency as a part-time side-quest, and only when we reached an OK level of revenues that could feed our families it became a full-time job and an actual funded company.
Ah, a spin out, ok, that makes good sense, and that helped you avoid a lot of the dangers that would have killed an entity all-in from day #1. More often than not that kind of pressure leads to sub-optimal decision making and you budded off in a nice and controlled way. Web agencies are pretty good as the basis for this kind of thing, I've seen it happen multiple times now. I think the reason is that you know exactly where the pain points of your customers are and that sets you up for productization. And in lean times you can't fall far because the agency customers will need to be served anyway.
That's a really neat and natural approach to build sustainable businesses, thank you for that and extra thanks for publishing something public others can point to as successful examples of that process being implemented in real life.
Agreed. What stands out to me is not just the revenue per employee, but the optionality it creates. Getting past that threshold buys you resilience and patience suddenly you can absorb slower years, fund bigger bets internally, and avoid being forced into bad financing decisions.
Congrats! Being able to run a nice company bootstrapped seems amazing.
Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;)
Your customers demand blazing-fast digital products, web standards are evolving at the speed of light, yet you rely on 15-years-old solutions like WordPress that force you to deliver heavy, low-quality user experiences.
I'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
>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.
Wow. Huge congrats! This is a real business that is profitable.
Our industry focuses so much on venture-backed startups (many of which are unprofitable) that would lose sight of one important goal when starting a business - be profitable!
In general, we try to keep things extremely simple. And then we simplify some more. If you're very strict on this basic rule and apply it at every level, from the start, you can go a long way with a small but stable team.
Regarding k8s: EKS is a very different beast compared to managing your own cluster in terms of complexity. We invested months into understanding a lot, yes, but then the day-to-day operations are not that heavy. At least, that's our opinion after 6 months; we'll see!
I would say k8s is a piece of software that enable teams to stay small. While the internals are insanely complex the developer experience is not that hard to learn.
I agree, though it takes some discipline to keep it simple and small. It can be really easy to let your clusters get huge, tools get complex, operator sprawl, etc. but keeping it simple and understandable is worth it in the long term.
The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.
The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.
My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.
It’s funny because I have no concept of why this kind of infrastructure is needed and by whom.
Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim.
> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
What is your industry/profession? The best way I've found to find problems worth solving, is working literally anywhere else than "software development shops". Basically any profession/workplace out there is filled with various inefficiencies, but you cannot ask people to point it out themselves, you have to be there and experience it yourself to actually fully understand what the problem is and what a correct/good solution actually looks like. Otherwise you end up with the typical "faster horse" problem-solving.
Once you're there, with the mindset of improving things, you start noticing a ton of areas things could be improved. Then just use your best judgement and start thinking why/how/when.
Totally agree, that's exactly what we did. As a web agency, we tried every CMS out there and struggled with all of them for different reasons (quality, maintenance, pricing, scalability, development speed), so we built our own. The key thing is you need to genuinely identify with the people you're selling to. Without that connection, every doubt (and there will be tons) becomes nearly impossible to overcome.
I'd wager that most agency devs have wanted to do this too. CMS's never work the way you want them to as an dev.
Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable.
It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time.
To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s.
Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?
It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.
Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.
> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.
Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!
As soon as you take in money, the businesses at some level, ceases to be yours. The only flaw is that with bootstrapping and one step at a time, it is more difficult to reach the unicorn-level, but as long as you are fairly successful and don't have infinite cravings and desires in terms of the life you want to live, the bootstrapping way is _the_ way.
Aiming for the middle ground: reasonable growth, good financial strategies based on unit cost profitability and a very tight hand on the purse will get you a solid business that can serve as the jump off point for many other things on top of giving the founders a much better shot at financial independence. This is all a variation on the risk/reward theme.
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...
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 the exceptions and very much not the norm. That's just survivorship bias.
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.
Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches. Again not an advocate for the VC funding, but I'd taken even $500k these days to get something up and running as the cost of capital is basically nothing aka YC.
Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based startups so much. I'm not against VC funding per se. It's just important to recognize that it's not the only path and that there's nothing wrong if that route isn't for you, for any reason. You can be successful in other ways.
10 years is long and if we take the revenues as linearly changing over time and the costs growing roughly linear along with it then years two and three must have been quite difficult, expectations need to be met but the money wasn't really there yet. But now there is.
Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;)
After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.
Our industry focuses so much on venture-backed startups (many of which are unprofitable) that would lose sight of one important goal when starting a business - be profitable!
Especially with the migration to k8s. K8s is much more complex than Heroku, some even say it requires an entire infra engineering team to manage.
Regarding k8s: EKS is a very different beast compared to managing your own cluster in terms of complexity. We invested months into understanding a lot, yes, but then the day-to-day operations are not that heavy. At least, that's our opinion after 6 months; we'll see!
The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.
https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp
Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim.
What is your industry/profession? The best way I've found to find problems worth solving, is working literally anywhere else than "software development shops". Basically any profession/workplace out there is filled with various inefficiencies, but you cannot ask people to point it out themselves, you have to be there and experience it yourself to actually fully understand what the problem is and what a correct/good solution actually looks like. Otherwise you end up with the typical "faster horse" problem-solving.
Once you're there, with the mindset of improving things, you start noticing a ton of areas things could be improved. Then just use your best judgement and start thinking why/how/when.
Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable.
It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time.
Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?
It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.