How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
Published in 2022, this chronicle by @ksahin details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $1M ARR.
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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 316 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 148 comments
Great pitch and inspiring story. I've been involved with a few startups that failed. So, I know a lot about humility and hard work. Basically, my first starup we were naive. It ended with an acquisition which was ultimately worth nothing. The startup that acquired us raised a lot but ultimately failed as well and I personally turned off the lights (by means of shutting down our AWS stuff). After that, I consulted for a while to make money and then got involved again with another startup. But this time with the wisdom of hindsight.
I've got a good feeling about my latest effort (tryformation.com) where I am the CTO. For the first time, I have a combination of talent around me, a market that is showing actual interest in what we do (and paying us), and a level of control over our product, tech, and road map that means it is really my job to not mess this up. It's still super risky but there's a good chance I can make it work this time. I rebooted the product (rebuilt it from scratch), I've defined our product and vision and took ownership of the product roadmap. And it's working. We are closing deals and getting positive feedback from our early customers. This year is critical for us.
Early revenue is super hard without significant funding. Accepting pizza money from some accelerator helps a little but it's really not about the money usually but about getting some coaching, advice, and building a network around your company of people that can help you. If you are doing SAAS, you need sales people. And not just any people but good ones. A warm introduction can make all the difference you need.
Of course the trick is picking the right accelerator. YC, Techstars (for which I have mentored), and a few others stand out as being awesome. In our case, we actually joined the Bosch Startup Harbour program in Berlin, which helped us build relationships with German industries. Some of those are now becoming customers and a few others might follow. So, good value for us. We did not give away equity and we did not receive a lot in terms of cash. But it helped us a lot.
This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together:
Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/
Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/
Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/automated-queries
$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.
@daolf and team: Congrats on this significant milestone and thank you for being so candid about your growth journey.
I'm a bootstrapping founder, have a question about your amazing blog. Love the scrolling table of contents on the left and title/cta that appear on the top as you scroll. Do you mind sharing what cms/theme you use for your blog?
Unless I missed it completely, a suggestion I have for your blog is to have a search feature.
That said, genuinely inspired by your story and grateful for your transparency on how you made it happen. All the best!
Kevin, Pierre: congrats! And thanks for all your help to the NewsCatcher team.
We use ScrapingBee's SEO progress as a benchmark of growth.
Also, to the HN crowd, we found out about TinySeed from ScrapingBee, and applied and got in for the next batch. We've grown from ~4k MRR to 16k MRR in 10 months.
So, to anyone who consider apply to YC, I'd recommend to take a look at TinySeed: https://tinyseed.com/
When people ask me why I like being the founder of a company, I often reply with a small story: when we built our first saas for SMB, we billed .50€ per API call and we plugged those calls to a Slack bot. Man how great it felt in the firsts weeks when this bot would send a message around 20 times a day: the sound of finally having built something valuable that would generate value even if I'd be out of my computer, running or anything else really.
Long live scrappingbee!