Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud
Published in 2013, this chronicle by @brainless 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 132 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 38 comments
Here at Toptal we were boot strapped for more than a year before taking any money from a16z and others. It not only helps funding, it also helps the core of your company run at a fundamental level; seeing every operation through the lens of profit vs. loss which most (purely) funded VC companies don't grasp very well at all. It's extremely important.
It was at one time a good example but Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million into Github one year ago.
http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-development/ ↗
Braintree is not a great example of a company that "didn't take VC." According to Crunchbase they raised a $34 million series A round and a $35 million series B round. BigCommerce also raised a $15 million series A round and a $20 million series B round.
Cool to see FlightAware there. Their system runs on mod_rivet: http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/ ↗ which I helped to develop. Karl is a nice guy, too.
I wish HN would mandate all submission to have [years] behind it. This is from 2010!
Github was invested $100M as many would have known. Asmallorange has been sold to Endurance Group.