Kyle Harrison
concept

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping

Building a company without outside venture funding, growing from revenue and owner capital. The saved posts, essays and reading notes filed here mostly argue that the venture path is a poor fit for most companies, and collect examples of businesses that grew without it.

  • Most companies are not venture scale. Most companies aren’t venture scale… (tweet) (Andrew Wilkinson): most companies cannot grow at 100%+ per year, yet most people starting tech companies think they need to raise venture. Why We’re Bootstrapping Readwise (Readwise) gives the founders’ case that making their market look venture-scale would have meant distorting it. Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company (Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad) describes shrinking from twenty employees to five and discovering that the market sets the growth rate. Strategy Letter I — Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon (Joel Spolsky) frames two viable growth models, slow and profitable or capital-fuelled land grab, with the choice forced by the market’s structure.
  • Examples. I Found a Business with… (tweet) describes a company with 50 employees and $1 billion in 2018 sales that never raised money; All of the wealthiest people… (tweet) (Nick Huber) says the self-made wealthy he knows started ordinary businesses that did not need venture capital; What are the largest still… (tweet) lists the largest bootstrapped software companies, opening with Epic Systems ($2.5B+ in revenue); Interview With Sodalicious Founder Kevin Auernig covers bootstrapping a soda chain from one store to seven; Zoho and Sridhar Vembu link here as a bootstrapped, profitable SaaS suite and its founder.
  • How-to and capital gaps. How do you bootstrap a… (tweet) (Paras Chopra) asks how to bootstrap a $20mn+ business in ten years without VC or angel funding; So so many want to… (tweet) (Tyler Tringas) observes that many want to buy, buy into or lend to profitable non-VC tech companies, but few write checks and do the work to help more get started; I Ran a Bootstrapped Product… (tweet) reports a year of a bootstrapped product studio that released ten products, of which one worked well.

Where this appears

Long reads

Reading queue

  • 3 Steps to a Suck-Free, Killer $3000 Venture (Medium)

People and companies

  • Sridhar Vembu, Zoho

Tweets

  • Most companies aren’t venture scale… (tweet), I Found a Business with… (tweet), All of the wealthiest people… (tweet), What are the largest still… (tweet), How do you bootstrap a… (tweet), So so many want to… (tweet), I Ran a Bootstrapped Product… (tweet), Request for product - anonymous… (tweet), @JagoPramodh Yes! Take a look… (tweet), [[@maiab 1211325255018569729 [STALE] (tweet)]]

Referenced in