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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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 :)
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.
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.
> 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!
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.
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 :)
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...
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?
I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!
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!
thank you! appreciate it :)
Would love to learn more about your approach to managing a small team and getting high scale. What is the best way to reach out?
email, I'm old fashioned! s.verna :)
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.
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.
Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!
Thank you thank you!
Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up!