We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR
Published in 2021, this chronicle by @mh_ details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $11M.
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 ★ 387 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 217 comments
The best part? Every penny of that $11M ARR is yours to spend however you wish. Nobody's going to question you if you take your company's money and spend it on a private helicopter or a summer beach home in Cyprus (all easily affordable for $11M). If you had accepted even a tiny pre-seed investment, you wouldn't have that freedom - the company's money is not yours, and although you could live comfortably on executive salary, bonuses, and stock sales, you can't avoid scrutiny until you've sold the company or IPO'ed.
The second best part about bootstrapping (specifically: solo bootstrapping)? The immense satisfaction of eating from the work of my own hands. I finally launched my side project last month, and it's making enough to pay for rent and food. I have no other source of income or savings, and the feeling is fantastic -- even though the amount I am earning right now is tiny, far less than what I earned as a private consultant or employee of a VC-backed firm before. I wouldn't trade this feeling of satisfaction for any other job in the world. The freedom of 100% ownership: earning, managing, and spending every dollar without having to answer to anyone is priceless.
Taking VC money is just a glorified type of employment with lottery returns.
Seems to be a lot of questions about how bootstrapped startups handle customer support.
I'm the cofounder of Eureka Surveys. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and just crossed 1M+ users. We've had an amazing experience hiring customer support in the Philippines. I have a thread about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/t0mstah/status/1356296043009253382
The tl;dr is that you can hire cheap ($3.50/hr), high quality virtual assistants from the Philippines to handle customer support for you, all from day one. Having CS has really made a difference for us in our business and is one of our main differentiators as we've scaled up the CS team. DM me on Twitter and I can connect you to some excellent VAs looking for jobs!
From friends I've talked with, the benefits of the valley are real, but diminishing. At the same time downsides are increasing: cost of living, homelessness, real estate prices (though I read these are coming down a bit). I've been told the benefit has been the ease of networking, and likely will always be so. As startup hubs grow around the country this networking benefit will start to be there. It is already there in some places such as Austin and Boston.
There are a number of hubs in the country now, with most outside the valley focusing on one or more niches. Some of these are:
- Nanotechnology in Boston and Middlesex-essex, MA
- Healthcare Boston, New York City, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Big investments though are being made in Kansas, Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania
- SaaS in Austin,TX
- Education in Boston
- Fintech in New York City
Nice writeup!
Speaking as someone that tried to be a founder from Brazil: I imagine that making it on Silicon Valley must be hard task on itself but making in an underdeveloped country makes odds stacked against you.
We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.
I'm a bit curious on how the team got overcame this issues, and would suggest you to repost this on a time that gets more traffic in americas, since is 3AM here.
Many of the customers of my B2B SaaS are the type of company from the article.
We're small enough that I check out the website of every new company. I continue to be amazed at the sheer breadth of small-ish, profitable companies, often bootstrapped, that I would normally never encounter.
Also, a shameless plug for my podcast for people running bootstrapped software companies: https://bootstrapped.fm/