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 4 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.

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Ah, a spin out, ok, that makes good sense, and that helped you avoid a lot of the dangers that would have killed an entity all-in from day #1. More often than not that kind of pressure leads to sub-optimal decision making and you budded off in a nice and controlled way. Web agencies are pretty good as the basis for this kind of thing, I've seen it happen multiple times now. I think the reason is that you know exactly where the pain points of your customers are and that sets you up for productization. And in lean times you can't fall far because the agency customers will need to be served anyway.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | 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.

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bn-l 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.

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steffoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-]

I think it may well be still worth it to look back and note it down as much as possible and I'm sure that it will be interesting to many people.

	▲	steffoz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Noted, thanks! :)

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YJfcboaDaJRDw 3 hours 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.