| ▲ | Doches 6 hours ago |
| > 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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| ▲ | jwr an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Fellow (solo) bootstrapper here. Congratulations to the author(s) of the article, and to all the other bootstrappers here. Remember, even if your business is smaller or doesn't have the incredible stellar growth numbers that these people posted, it's still YOUR BUSINESS. You are doing right by your customers (because they keep paying you), you have your own business, you do not depend on VCs, and you don't have to fake anything. This is incredibly liberating and should be cherished! |
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| ▲ | steffoz 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Totally! That’s the most important message. The numbers we’ve managed to achieve are beyond even the most optimistic outlook we had ten years ago, and we would have been (and were) genuinely happy and satisfied of what we were doing even with a tenth of the revenue. You definitely don't need this much to be proud of your company. |
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| ▲ | abc123abc123 5 hours ago | parent | prev | 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. |
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| ▲ | switz an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Fellow bootstrapper checking in. Made an ardent but delicate decision in 2015 not to raise money and ten years later I'm chugging along full-time on my business. Infinitely glad to have chosen this path. It was the right one for me. | |
| ▲ | steffoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 4 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. | | |
| ▲ | steffoz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | To be fair, it's rarely all for nothing for what I hear. Secondary stock sales [1] are very common and allow founders to take some big chips off the table. To me, it is more a matter of keeping things simple, manageable, safe and more fun for how I like to work :) https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary... | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but your personal preferences have an outsized effect on your chances for success because they are very much aligned. I know plenty of founders that gave it all and then some (including their health, their family relationships and in some cases their lives) and that ended up worse than the shape they were in when they started. So yes, you hear a lot of stories about secondary stock sales and so on but those are the exceptions and very much not the norm. That's just survivorship bias. | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Fellow small business owner here. Just as a reminder, discussing any successful (where successful is defined as not failed) business is a lesson in survivorship bias. Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years. |
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| ▲ | rexreed 5 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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| ▲ | jwr an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Why the "a few million in revenue" cutoff? In a solo-bootstrapped business you don't need a few million (USD or EUR) in revenue to run a successful business and live a really good life. In fact, depending on where you mostly live, much less than a single million might be plenty. | |
| ▲ | steffoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies! | | |
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