Your (bootstrapped/lean/side project) startup was profitable from day one?
I would love to read about startups which were profitable from day one and gained a lot of traction! Please share your story.
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @spIrr 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 31 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
I'd narrow the question - there's a difference between being profitable and having revenue.
1. Some companies have the revenue from day one, but never reach profitability
2. Some don't have revenue at day one but are profitable.
For example, most consulting businesses, when started by people who already have the chops for what they're doing and have clients lined up, tends to be like #1.
A company that needs to scale up it's online presence to be effective (for example, something that works on user network effect like ebay/craigslist/etc.) may not take in money during the product development phase, tend be be like #2.
You can also be a hybrid, like 37 signals that went from consulting and design for others to selling their own apps. I tend to think that this is one of the better methods of bootstrapping - you get exposure to customers and business methods, and can see where needs are, then target them, all the while taking in revenue.
The downside is that bootstrap method is that your consulting could cause contention for time/resources - you have to want to do both and be good at balancing them. If this is an issue, it may make sense to look for investors to put in capital to cover the dev phase.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com ↗
I wrote it in eight days with a budget of $60, and recouped that within three sales. It has been profitable since. I don't know if you would call it a lot of traction -- by Twitter accounting I have something like two hundred thousand users. Anyhow, 4 years and 3,500 odd paying customers later, it was paying my full-time salary, and I quit the day job. That was about 7 months ago. BCC (and consulting) gave me enough time, money, and smarts to get my next project ready.
http://www.appointmentreminder.org ↗
That launches in 48 hours. Depending on one's optimism in counting promised orders prior to the cash physically being in one's hand, it is already profitable.
When people say their bootstrapped business was profitable from day one, they're usually not getting paid any kind of salary from it.
When I started Lighthouse, we were "profitable" right away because of a few strategic deals. Our only monthly bill was to our CC gateway. At the time, my partner and I were both consulting to make ends meet. Essentially, we were working our asses off on two jobs and only getting one real paycheck out of it. I think it was about a year before Lighthouse could sustain us both.
In 2007 after few failed attempts with my crazy startup ideas I read lots of articles about how Google Arbitrage is dead. This inspired me to actually tried it out and I got profitable from day 1. This success led me to focus solely on marketing PPC-affiliate arbitrage and eventually building sites and domains. Now 3 years later after lots of hard work I have successful business with over $1 million in revenues that is well diversified across portfolio of sites and software products.
http://store.p212121.com/ ↗
An e-commerce site, I talked with a number of customers before launching (wish I had something more fascinating for you). The site fits under the category of scratching my own itch since I am a scientist. I wouldn't consider the site as having lots of traction nor expected it knowing the customer base. At the moment am focused on customer's problems and am quite dependent on word of mouth.