| ▲ | 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13(datocms.com) |
| 123 points by steffoz 7 hours ago | 29 comments |
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| ▲ | cwiggs a minute ago | parent | next [-] |
| Curious how you run things and have good work life balance for your employees, with so few people? Especially with the migration to k8s. K8s is much more complex than Heroku, some even say it requires an entire infra engineering team to manage. |
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| ▲ | sebstefan 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The pricing page is messed up on Firefox https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | steffoz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | bn-l an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so. |
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| ▲ | YJfcboaDaJRDw an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Doches 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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! |
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| ▲ | abc123abc123 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | steffoz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not only that, the vast bulk of unicorn wanna-be's end up failing (sometimes failing upwards though) and then it is all for nothing. Aiming for the middle ground: reasonable growth, good financial strategies based on unit cost profitability and a very tight hand on the purse will get you a solid business that can serve as the jump off point for many other things on top of giving the founders a much better shot at financial independence. This is all a variation on the risk/reward theme. | | |
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| ▲ | rexreed 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
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| ▲ | antonhag 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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.
After all, you'll be there in only 5 years! |
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| ▲ | smurda 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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! |
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| ▲ | steffoz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | thank you! appreciate it :) | | |
| ▲ | rexreed 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would love to learn more about your approach to managing a small team and getting high scale. What is the best way to reach out? | | |
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| ▲ | danielfalbo 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And huge kudos for doing it from Italy! |
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| ▲ | le-mark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success. |
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| ▲ | kubb 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s funny because I have no concept of why this kind of infrastructure is needed and by whom. Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them. Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them. What is your industry/profession? The best way I've found to find problems worth solving, is working literally anywhere else than "software development shops". Basically any profession/workplace out there is filled with various inefficiencies, but you cannot ask people to point it out themselves, you have to be there and experience it yourself to actually fully understand what the problem is and what a correct/good solution actually looks like. Otherwise you end up with the typical "faster horse" problem-solving. Once you're there, with the mindset of improving things, you start noticing a ton of areas things could be improved. Then just use your best judgement and start thinking why/how/when. | | |
| ▲ | steffoz an hour ago | parent [-] | | Totally agree, that's exactly what we did. As a web agency, we tried every CMS out there and struggled with all of them for different reasons (quality, maintenance, pricing, scalability, development speed), so we built our own. The key thing is you need to genuinely identify with the people you're selling to. Without that connection, every doubt (and there will be tons) becomes nearly impossible to overcome. | | |
| ▲ | sbarre 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s. Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product? It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products. | |
| ▲ | apocalyptic0n3 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'd wager that most agency devs have wanted to do this too. CMS's never work the way you want them to as an dev. Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable. It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time. |
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| ▲ | chrisrickard 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards! |
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| ▲ | isoprophlex 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up! |
