Why We're Bootstrapping Readwise (2018)
Published in 2019, this chronicle by @tristanho details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
A budding minority within the tech community ... supplies an alternative:
A nice article (I am a fan of anything that supports reading!) but seriously, bootstrapping has been the default since literally forever (i.e. presumably since the beginning of commerce, before the invention of reading). Tons of successful businesses have been built that way, they may just not look that way to you.
Consider that many may be bootrapped businesses that later wanted money to grow more rapidly than organically. As companies like that will have already demonstrated market value and execution ability they can typically get better valuations than just a PPT or a PPT+MVP
Often I'll buy a non fiction book solely so I can evangelize some best practice or methodology by sharing the book around.
I still buy physical non fiction books because physical ones are just so much more easier to share without worrying about copyright infringement.
Barring physical, I'd use Amazon precisely because it's easier to "lend" someone a book if you're both on the same platform.
Oh man, I’d never heard of Readwise before but this seems so useful! I love things like highlights and notes on the Kindle, and how words you look up are added to a special list for review later, but I never could figure out a simple way to take advantage of that later. Does Readwise also handle that new word use case? I love expanding my vocabulary and tend to exclusively read on a Kindle.
I've bootstrapped everything I've ever built. Yet, I constantly get investor pitches from bootcamp/accelerators/etc. One of them I got just the other day put forward this interesting offer: "$25K for 6% equity" on my current bootstrapped project which is earning about $20k per month in profit. Thanks, but no thanks!
Now that we're bootstrapping, we've shifted away from a freemium business model (where users could optionally pay if they wanted) to a paid-only model after a free trial.
I think this is great, and where venture capital fails; having real demand and not only focus on growth.
Founder of Readwise here -- just posted this article from ~10 months ago on a whim. Happy to answer any qs or chat about how the decision to start bootstrapping has gone since then (well!)