> 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!
Fellow (solo) bootstrapper here. Congratulations to the author(s) of the article, and to all the other bootstrappers here. Remember, even if your business is smaller or doesn't have the incredible stellar growth numbers that these people posted, it's still YOUR BUSINESS. You are doing right by your customers (because they keep paying you), you have your own business, you do not depend on VCs, and you don't have to fake anything. This is incredibly liberating and should be cherished!
Totally! That’s the most important message. The numbers we’ve managed to achieve are beyond even the most optimistic outlook we had ten years ago, and we would have been (and were) genuinely happy and satisfied of what we were doing even with a tenth of the revenue. You definitely don't need this much to be proud of your company.
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.
Fellow bootstrapper checking in. Made an ardent but delicate decision in 2015 not to raise money and ten years later I'm chugging along full-time on my business. Infinitely glad to have chosen this path. It was the right one for me.
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.
Errm I think me and my mates count as bootstrappers. Never heard the term before but we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring.
We have three Directors and a slack handful of employees, that varies around 15 to 25 depending on customers, pandemics, Brexit and murderous Russians.
We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night.
My top tip is to build up a current account balance that will cover the basics for your defined risk period. So, for us that period is six months. The basics are: Corporation tax, VAT and salaries. You'll note I don't mention director's remuneration - that's a nice to have (for me).
I have two customers at the moment that are dealing with going bankrupt, although one looks like they will be OK. I refuse to join them. Small business cash flow is hard, really hard. It's so easy to be tempted to do something daft or to ignore warning signs.
The world is a pretty hard place and not all tech companies get to spawn zillionares. You won't get to use my company as a poster child for funky ... whatever but we are still trading and I'm quite happy with that.
Napoleon disparagingly described Britain as a "nation of shop keepers" - I'll take that and wear it as a badge of honour 8)
> we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring
We too like to call us boring :) This kind of boring is so good.
> We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night.
On one hand 25 years in business is a mind-blowing achievement. But at the same time, just "nice" is the right way to see it. Being comfortable and sleep well at night is exactly what we all want. You don't need to set the world on fire to be proud of what you do!
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?
In a solo-bootstrapped business you don't need a few million (USD or EUR) in revenue to run a successful business and live a really good life. In fact, depending on where you mostly live, much less than a single million might be plenty.
Another one from a fellow bootstrapper. I have been doing it for 10+ years with a small team as well. Haven't hit the same revenue as them but still a very good business and has provided me everything I have for last 10 years keeping 100% full control. It is really really hard to do it over such a long period and admire anyone who has done it even better than I have.
PS: This is not for lack of trying to raise VC, but the trying was not nearly on the level needed to actually raise it. Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman tried much harder to raise, with far, far less built. Part of me wishes I had done that. I'm open to advice as to how to raise properly, should it be a Seed round or Series A at this point, and how to get meetings with the VCs and herd the cats in a way that will actually be successful. For reference, I'm based in NYC.
PPS: I've had a lot more success and fun raising from angels (who make their own decisions about their own money) and remain open to it. Especially people who are aligned with what we're doing. I've found much of the VC signaling to be disingenuous (e.g. "we love funding startups who do X" actually means "we want dealflow and orbiters to get into rounds with large well-known VCs"). But maybe that's just my bias because I didn't pursue fundraising diligently enough.
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.
Ah, a spin out, ok, that makes good sense, and that helped you avoid a lot of the dangers that would have killed an entity all-in from day #1. More often than not that kind of pressure leads to sub-optimal decision making and you budded off in a nice and controlled way. Web agencies are pretty good as the basis for this kind of thing, I've seen it happen multiple times now. I think the reason is that you know exactly where the pain points of your customers are and that sets you up for productization. And in lean times you can't fall far because the agency customers will need to be served anyway.
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.
Fellow bootstrapper here, roughly in your ballpark - €4M+ revenue, team of 18, bootstrapped for 12 years.
Only bootstrappers understand the bootstrap hustle ;) But what an amazing business you have built there - be proud, you deserve it.
Let me share a personal founder story if I may: after 12 years of building the company, I decided to step down as CEO, moved on and spent the last 6 months working on different projects, learned A LOT about AI coding, went to Iceland, Texas. Had a great time. Yet after only 6 months I experienced the strongest "pull" you can imagine, back to my bootstrapped company of 12 years. And here I am - December has been an amazing time, getting back to work. And next year we have ambitious plans ahead!
Congrats! Being able to run a nice company bootstrapped seems amazing.
Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;)
Your customers demand blazing-fast digital products, web standards are evolving at the speed of light, yet you rely on 15-years-old solutions like WordPress that force you to deliver heavy, low-quality user experiences.
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!
I've been using Dato for years for private projects (would love a Hobby tier ;) ) and have been impressed with it from the start.
Hearing that Dato and the people behind it are thriving makes me very happy!
A success that's well deserved! :-D
Same here. Been with them since the beginning (or what felt like the beginning) and have always been impressed with their constant drive to get out new features and make sure their core stuff is still rock solid.
Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.
But employees get a part of the cake too! If profits are high, we all celebrate together! During 2025, 7% of the profits have been shared with our employees (and stable freelancers). In 2024 it was 6%.
It's Europe; salaries suck across the board. That's the market, so there are no competing offers. Then again it's incredibly hard to fire people. Maybe they should start a union after all.
I don’t give employees (and stable freelancers/contractors) the minimum I can get away with; I give them a fair share of the profits on top of their regular salary.
I’m not sure how common this model is in Europe, but it has certainly helped me keep my best employee with me throughout the entire journey and feel much less alone in my decisions—especially at the beginning, when things are harder.
What are you even referring to?
Salaries in many European countries are perfectly fine when compared to the costs of living etc.
Inflated salaries with inflated prices for everything else aren‘t just better because the number is higher ^^
I have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out.
I think you should create a bootstrapped business in established domain. In this case it is CMS, it could be very specific domain like network security, ci/cd, paas etc. Where VC is not pouring money and they think it is not forward looking, your alpha of building a big bootstrapped business is huge. Another key thing is that you should have the muscle to generate and collect revenue with discipline. If the revenue cycle is off you have trouble as a bootstrapped org.
I would use AI but not build an AI bootstrapped started business at this moment in time as there is huge growth capital invested in the market. But theres always an exception for eg. Midjourney et al. But thats that.
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Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!
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.
We have three Directors and a slack handful of employees, that varies around 15 to 25 depending on customers, pandemics, Brexit and murderous Russians.
We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night.
My top tip is to build up a current account balance that will cover the basics for your defined risk period. So, for us that period is six months. The basics are: Corporation tax, VAT and salaries. You'll note I don't mention director's remuneration - that's a nice to have (for me).
I have two customers at the moment that are dealing with going bankrupt, although one looks like they will be OK. I refuse to join them. Small business cash flow is hard, really hard. It's so easy to be tempted to do something daft or to ignore warning signs.
The world is a pretty hard place and not all tech companies get to spawn zillionares. You won't get to use my company as a poster child for funky ... whatever but we are still trading and I'm quite happy with that.
Napoleon disparagingly described Britain as a "nation of shop keepers" - I'll take that and wear it as a badge of honour 8)
> we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring
We too like to call us boring :) This kind of boring is so good.
> We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night.
On one hand 25 years in business is a mind-blowing achievement. But at the same time, just "nice" is the right way to see it. Being comfortable and sleep well at night is exactly what we all want. You don't need to set the world on fire to be proud of what you do!
In a solo-bootstrapped business you don't need a few million (USD or EUR) in revenue to run a successful business and live a really good life. In fact, depending on where you mostly live, much less than a single million might be plenty.
PS: This is not for lack of trying to raise VC, but the trying was not nearly on the level needed to actually raise it. Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman tried much harder to raise, with far, far less built. Part of me wishes I had done that. I'm open to advice as to how to raise properly, should it be a Seed round or Series A at this point, and how to get meetings with the VCs and herd the cats in a way that will actually be successful. For reference, I'm based in NYC.
PPS: I've had a lot more success and fun raising from angels (who make their own decisions about their own money) and remain open to it. Especially people who are aligned with what we're doing. I've found much of the VC signaling to be disingenuous (e.g. "we love funding startups who do X" actually means "we want dealflow and orbiters to get into rounds with large well-known VCs"). But maybe that's just my bias because I didn't pursue fundraising diligently enough.
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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.
Fellow bootstrapper here, roughly in your ballpark - €4M+ revenue, team of 18, bootstrapped for 12 years.
Only bootstrappers understand the bootstrap hustle ;) But what an amazing business you have built there - be proud, you deserve it.
Let me share a personal founder story if I may: after 12 years of building the company, I decided to step down as CEO, moved on and spent the last 6 months working on different projects, learned A LOT about AI coding, went to Iceland, Texas. Had a great time. Yet after only 6 months I experienced the strongest "pull" you can imagine, back to my bootstrapped company of 12 years. And here I am - December has been an amazing time, getting back to work. And next year we have ambitious plans ahead!
Big kudos. Such an inspiration.
Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;)
After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!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!
Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.
isn't it sensitive to disclose this kind of info when you don't have to? are you worried about your employees all demanding raises when they see this?
https://www.datocms.com/company/profit-sharing
I’m not sure how common this model is in Europe, but it has certainly helped me keep my best employee with me throughout the entire journey and feel much less alone in my decisions—especially at the beginning, when things are harder.
Plus, it's just more fun to share when you can.
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I think you should create a bootstrapped business in established domain. In this case it is CMS, it could be very specific domain like network security, ci/cd, paas etc. Where VC is not pouring money and they think it is not forward looking, your alpha of building a big bootstrapped business is huge. Another key thing is that you should have the muscle to generate and collect revenue with discipline. If the revenue cycle is off you have trouble as a bootstrapped org.
I would use AI but not build an AI bootstrapped started business at this moment in time as there is huge growth capital invested in the market. But theres always an exception for eg. Midjourney et al. But thats that.