Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!

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.

Fellow bootstrapper here, roughly in your ballpark - €4M+ revenue, team of 18, bootstrapped for 12 years.

Only bootstrappers understand the bootstrap hustle ;) But what an amazing business you have built there - be proud, you deserve it.

Let me share a personal founder story if I may: after 12 years of building the company, I decided to step down as CEO, moved on and spent the last 6 months working on different projects, learned A LOT about AI coding, went to Iceland, Texas. Had a great time. Yet after only 6 months I experienced the strongest "pull" you can imagine, back to my bootstrapped company of 12 years. And here I am - December has been an amazing time, getting back to work. And next year we have ambitious plans ahead!

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. 

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!

isn't it sensitive to disclose this kind of info when you don't have to? are you worried about your employees all demanding raises when they see this?

I think you should create a bootstrapped business in established domain. In this case it is CMS, it could be very specific domain like network security, ci/cd, paas etc. Where VC is not pouring money and they think it is not forward looking, your alpha of building a big bootstrapped business is huge. Another key thing is that you should have the muscle to generate and collect revenue with discipline. If the revenue cycle is off you have trouble as a bootstrapped org.

I would use AI but not build an AI bootstrapped started business at this moment in time as there is huge growth capital invested in the market. But theres always an exception for eg. Midjourney et al. But thats that.

Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches. Again not an advocate for the VC funding, but I'd taken even $500k these days to get something up and running as the cost of capital is basically nothing aka YC.

As a fellow bootstrapper the lack of flexibility when it came to dealing with customer service was super frustrating. I referred a few fellow founder friends to them early on but now have made it a priority to switch to an alternative.

Congrats on the 65% margins though!

One thing I am confused on that is tangential to the main topic: What does this (SAAS?) service do? It looks like it might be a middle ground between Heroku and Wordpress? A GUI website builder of some sort with an integrated database, and tool for editing articles or other content with a web UI?

It's been rock solid for us.

mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?

For a laugh, here is our founder chat from this weekend:

GB: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/englishpaulm_just-heard-from-...

CB: I'm glad we don't have to deal with that shit.:hankey:

EE: arg. yeah. I think about the funding route at times, but then see threads like this, and it’s a lot of yuck.

GB: Terrible. They did invest, but they just squeezed the founder out.

CB: How is the new vacation home?

Hope to see you guys being written about in the same fashion as https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-c...

down the road.

i have not read the history of this project but i would consider this as pure luck and nothing more(sadly). nothing wrong with that, but understand that this is a unicorn(not as in 1B company but as someone who was able to make profit).

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Ah, here it is:

> DatoCMS started in 2015 as an internal tool for our italian web agency.

Yeah, almost every agency used to have its own system back then, before drupal, wordpress and other CMSs were more popular.

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.

https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp

This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.

I’m a former VC, and a former CMS company founder (late 1990s for the CMS side, competing with Genuity for instance), and I’m impressed at your margins and success delivering CMS tools, but I think you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and although you don’t realize it, you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy.

Consider this a gentle nudge to think about growing more quickly - I’d propose to you that you’ve misunderstood the rule of 40 - or a useful way to interpret it - in your case, I think it tells you that you have room to spend more on marketing, and thus grow more quickly. You’re clearly happy with high margins and cashflow - don’t ever change! But, unless you’ve tapped out your market (I do not believe this is true for CMS worldwide for a company with 6.5m in revenue) then you have more growth you could achieve by spending some of that profit.

Should you care about this? I’ve noticed over the years that as a general rule some European founders proudly care less about growth than American ones, so clearly there is some default cultural difference here. In this case, though, I think the American values build more successful companies, and I think you should care about growth more than your blog post says you do.

The simple reason is this - you’re tiny. You’ve probably spent no more than 30mm EUR on product development over the life of the company. If any mid-size company with functional distribution and tech wanted to take your business away, they could. Because of how open you are, they could probably do it for even less - much of the value of the thought and engineering and architectural work you’ve done is published with your APIs, developer tools, and so on. This is real existential risk to your business - different than not being able to make payroll, but one that might well hit you on a random Tuesday and not be easily solvable without a major change and possibly outside help (e.g. investment or a buyer)

Years ago, I pitched the idea of my own CMS company staying small to 90s era billionaire Ed McVaney, founder of JD Edwards; one of the first successful ERP companies (sold to Peoplesoft then Oracle) - he told me “in software it’s grow or die.” I think this is generally true. I ultimately sold my portion of that company and it morphed into an agency, where it seems to have cheerfully stayed small and sustainable by layering on services - much worse economic model than you currently have.

Anyway, I hope you are writing the 20 year retrospective happily in 10 years from now; if you are, I think you will have needed to successfully grow into a more defensible market position - don’t put it off. It’ll remove another layer of risk, and make you more money in the bargain!