Selling My Bootstrapped SaaS Business
Published in 2017, this chronicle by @AlikhanPeleg 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 Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 311 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 120 comments
I wanted to keep my first business as a life-style business, to fund other ventures, because the income is financially a much better deal than a sale... but also found that it just takes too much to run miltiple ventures (Elon Musk notwithstanding).
Really liked the "see an opportunity", of the business being worth more owned by them - the sale creates value in the world. Really, it's how a sale of anything, product/service, should be.
Unfortunately, getting a business into a saleable state, and getting a sale actually done, seem about as much work as creating a profitable (but not self-running) business in the first place. Conceptually analogous to Brooks' program vs. product.
Typo/something missing after that?
This article is awesome and super helpful, but that particular point seems like terrible advice. Surely it would be much better to hire a marketing/adwords contractor, and increase the value of your company by getting more customers.
I don't think I would want to purposefully leave any "room for improvement", just to make a startup more attractive to buyers who have some experience with ads and SEO. I'd prefer to do the best job I possibly can, and I'm sure people would be still interested in buying, as long as you have the customers and revenue.
...the cash, from selling the business has built momentum for other projects like [...] angel investing,
I just knew that would be in there. Why do so many tech people seem to think that VC investment is what they want to be doing once they have spare cash? This isn't a personal critique of the OP, but it just seems so very common in general. I don't understand it.
I'm kinda wowed that something so rudimentary (the map doesn't even have clustering FFS!) can generate a "life changing" income.
Developed during a single flight? It shows. So the real question is, why the $$$$$ valuation?!
Excellent and very informative post. I'd love to see the things SureSwift needed for due diligence and their hand-over list - it would be a good checklist of things you need to have squared away to ensure a smooth transaction.