Who is living off their (bootstrapped) startup fulltime?
This is a spiritual successor to this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924909. However, I am hoping to just hear from bootstrappers today.
Show us what is paying your bills. Inspiration for those that are not there yet.
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @jarcoal 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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 56 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 20 comments
I started Personal MBA (http://personalmba.com) a few years ago as a side project. It's now a six-figure publishing business that's growing rapidly. Offers include trade published books, self-published books, online courses, live training, and consulting. (Recently, I've been moving to less consulting and more products.) I quit my job at a big corporation a few years ago to work on the business full-time.
I don't have employees, have very low overhead, have zero consumer/business debt, and we're in the process of building a house. I choose new projects primarily based on what I find most interesting, and I have no need to chase financing to grow.
My wife also runs a bootstrapped six-figure publishing business in a different market. That business was built in a lot less time, and she was able to recoup production expenses for three high-priced professional training courses that sell very well to an addressable market.
We also spend a lot of time with our daughter, which is why we both chose to build bootstrapped businesses.
Building a great bootstrapped business is definitely possible. Keep at it.
I am living (frugally) off http://pagekite.net/ at the moment.
TBH I am not sure it counts as we managed to secure a government grant for building our initial product. We've got a year left of "runway" before we need to either become cash-flow positive or bite the bullet and seek outside investment.
As I said, I realize this may not really count as bootstrapping, but I mention it as I think it may be an interesting (and oft overlooked) way to fund the early stages of a tech start-up, at least in places where local governments have programs in place to encourage economic development.
(For those who don't know what PageKite is, its main use is as a tool for web developers to demo and test sites on localhost against the public Internet - but we have ambitions to grow and become an alternative to traditional hosting and help make desktop apps and embedded devices integrate better with the web.)
I started my business in earnest freshman year of college, 2003/2004, with virtually no money. I developed a handful of SaaS webapps with a couple tens of thousands of users I support on my own. It's a lifestyle business, with no employees and no grand ambitions... just enough work for a comfortable schedule and good enough pay that I'd never trade it in for regular employment.
http://www.dangrossman.info/category/portfolio/
Launched a vertical ad network a few years ago with 2 friends.
Took no salary for 6 months, then a small salary to pay the bills for the next 9 months.
Then... business started to grow to yearly low seven figures in revenue and we're now paying ourselves a reasonable salary, contributing to retirement, and building up our company's cash reserves for future investments.
My business partner and I have been running Menuism (http://www.menuism.com) since 2006. It's bootstrapped and profitable. We also run The Wedding Lens (http://www.theweddinglens.com) and PickFu (http://pickfu.com).