Bootstrapped GitHub Now Raising a Round from Andreessen Horowitz
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @dylanvee details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 187 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 124 comments
If you browse through github's blog you can easily see what happened the last few months:
* github managed to hire & acquihire top talent like crazy
* their UI/UX people really focused on making github's UI more consistent and usable
* they spent time to go native
* the enterprise solution got a lot of love
so they have huge momentum and spend their time very well. personally I think they should look into making jobs.github.com THE resource to hire great talent. In a way github already is very relevant in the hiring process but similar to carreers.stackoverflow there is huge untapped opportunity to disrupt the hiring market.
Anyway I think github has a bright future ahead and I'm very curious about what will happen in the coming months.
I think it's easy to over-estimate the success and ubiquity of GitHub if you spend all day on HN. The real money-make for SCM is still Perforce, according to schacon at a somewhat recent drink-up in Boston.
These questions about GitHub vs. Pinterest are revealing in that I think many folk on HN don't realize what a relatively small community of developers this is. Relative to the tens of millions of folk on Pinerest. Heck, GitHub's front page reveals they have only 1.6 million users.
I wonder if their growth curve has started to flatten out. I hope they have a great plan/vision for what to do with the money, because running GitHub ad infinitum as an immensely successful small software company would seem to be a dream to me.
I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often), was very anti-VC.
Here is a link to the talk, and a relevant quote from the introduction:
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754 ↗
"But for me, I don't have to worry about these things, because GitHub has never taken any funding, ever. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can avoid this mess of VC, if you so choose, by telling you a little bit of my story."
This makes sense in a "as go the alpha geeks, so goes the rest of the world... eventually" sort of way.
Git and github-style content-management requires a mental model very different from the mass/mass-enterprise market... but the tech-leaders way of thinking will reach there over time via repeated exposure, and Github is doing a great job of providing the benefits in approachable steps, and a whole package of related modern hosting/distribution/authoring assistance.
Why wouldn't presentations, spreadsheets, and all other forms of writing eventually be amenable to dvcs-style revision control?
Two questions:
- How is GitHub worth less than Pintrest?
- What could GitHub possibly gain from raising money? It's clearly not about money. Is this a liquidity event? Couldn't they just issue a dividend for that, they've clearly got plenty of cash… Or is this about the credibility of having a valuation. In that case, couldn't they have gone public? Amazon went public at a sub-$500M valuation, and look at them now!
Edit: come to think of it, I can see the possibility of wanting to acquire other companies, and not currently having the capital to do so. That's about it.