> 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Same, I learned to code to build software for my business. I turned it into a SaaS and turned down investment because my original business was already profitable and making the SaaS better was making the business better.
This is why I trust software made by people who come from that industry or have some background. I’ve seen too many startups where the founders are fresh out of college and have never worked in that niche and have never been in the shoes of the people they are trying to sell to. To me, that just means they are trying to get big and get acquired, I’m just a means to that end.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm looking for companies that are small by intent, but also looking to scale sustainably and grow beyond the capabilities of a single person. There are a lot of small businesses / solopreneurs / freelancers who work enough to get by or do a few hundred $K as a salary replacement, but aren't looking to build anything bigger. A lot of those companies also go by the wayside when the founder retires, gets hired, or something happens. And there's already a lot of content and sources for those types of solopreneur / single founder freelancers / side hustle type businesses.
I'm looking for the other stories of small teams scaling big. I'm basically separating side-hustles and solopreneurs as freelancers from a more sustainable business. Revenue is a cutoff as a way to differentiate, but doesn't have to be the only one.
For sure however, a team of 5 doing $20M implies something significant is happening at scale versus a solopreneur making what would otherwise be salary-replacement level money. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love solopreneurship. Just trying to find those other stories, which are much harder to find.
Yeah and a lot of these are small only temporarily. Many of these startups are following the grow-at-all-costs VC philosophy that doesn't optimize for small team size. So I'm trying to find those alternate stories. Much harder to find, so when I see the post like this of OP's, I get excited. Hard to find stories of teams that are small by intent, but looking to scale big.
Another one from a fellow bootstrapper. I have been doing it for 10+ years with a small team as well. Haven't hit the same revenue as them but still a very good business and has provided me everything I have for last 10 years keeping 100% full control. It is really really hard to do it over such a long period and admire anyone who has done it even better than I have.
Run an LMS product. https://academyofmine.com Working on a big pivot for next year. Funny but the pivot is to go more headless but for learning platform. Would follow your journey going forward.
PS: This is not for lack of trying to raise VC, but the trying was not nearly on the level needed to actually raise it. Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman tried much harder to raise, with far, far less built. Part of me wishes I had done that. I'm open to advice as to how to raise properly, should it be a Seed round or Series A at this point, and how to get meetings with the VCs and herd the cats in a way that will actually be successful. For reference, I'm based in NYC.
PPS: I've had a lot more success and fun raising from angels (who make their own decisions about their own money) and remain open to it. Especially people who are aligned with what we're doing. I've found much of the VC signaling to be disingenuous (e.g. "we love funding startups who do X" actually means "we want dealflow and orbiters to get into rounds with large well-known VCs"). But maybe that's just my bias because I didn't pursue fundraising diligently enough.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Dato for years for private projects (would love a Hobby tier ;) ) and have been impressed with it from the start.
Hearing that Dato and the people behind it are thriving makes me very happy!
A success that's well deserved! :-D
Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.
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.
> 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.
Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based startups so much. I'm not against VC funding per se. It's just important to recognize that it's not the only path and that there's nothing wrong if that route isn't for you, for any reason. You can be successful in other ways.
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!
Very cool on on the business model details! I love this model of doing it for multiple reasons.
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 a headless CMS. One place where editors can store and edit content, which is then exposed through a REST API so you can use it in your website, app, emails, etc…
Huge companies use it to centralise marketing copy and media.
Not just huge companies.. lots of web agencies [1] and mid-sized businesses use us to manage their web presence, mostly for the same reason: building custom sites quickly without the hassle of maintaining software. We’re not really optimized for huge websites (or customers).
it's not hard to make something without funding, even by yourself, as long as you have the time and skill. but problem of the internet of today is saturation. you can have the best service or tool, much better than the number one on the market, but if you have no cash to burn on ads, you won't get anywhere.
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.
We've been using Dato for 5 years or so - a bit of a weird use case probably, we're driving configuration of our internal EHR with it. But it is very nice for creating a structured set of data models and then you've got a nice UI to input the data and a nice API for grabbing the data, all of which the engineering team didn't need to build.
In general, we try to keep things extremely simple. And then we simplify some more. If you're very strict on this basic rule and apply it at every level, from the start, you can go a long way with a small but stable team.
Regarding k8s: EKS is a very different beast compared to managing your own cluster in terms of complexity. We invested months into understanding a lot, yes, but then the day-to-day operations are not that heavy. At least, that's our opinion after 6 months; we'll see!
I would say k8s is a piece of software that enable teams to stay small. While the internals are insanely complex the developer experience is not that hard to learn.
I agree, though it takes some discipline to keep it simple and small. It can be really easy to let your clusters get huge, tools get complex, operator sprawl, etc. but keeping it simple and understandable is worth it in the long term.
The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.
>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
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.
Define “successful Italian agency” :) If breaking even every year with 20+ employees counts as successful, then yes—successful. But I think you may have a mistaken idea of the level of support and investment that the “incubating” company actually provided. With the limited effort I put into this product over the years before it started to work, all I really needed was any stable job and a few hours each week. You don’t need a particularly favorable setup to pursue a bootstrapped approach... but you do need to be very comfortable with the timeline for seeing results.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
I did say both open source and commercial, in the context of "starting a business around a new CMS", so you may be correct about the open source side of the market but that wasn't really what I was asking about.
The commercial/SaaS side specifically is quite crowded now, with lots of good options for businesses of all sizes.
That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.
Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.
> DatoCMS started in 2015 as an internal tool for our italian web agency.
Just trying to sit down and come up with a successful business is really hard. The few friends I have who have made it are engineers who left a company to do something related to what they already did. I even had a few who took funding and sold to the company they left.
> 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.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.
My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.
Well, for a start, you guys brag about having great margins, which is not a problem in itself, but as a potential customer, it gives me the impression that the product could be cheaper.
Then it's all self-congratulatory, with overemphasis that I find lacking taste. Just my personal opinion...
Businesses have no issue with their suppliers making reasonable margins as long as the value offered is acceptable or better.
I'd rather know a supplier is healthy than scraping by. I just got an email from one of mine saying that they aren't doing great, so please buy as much as possible before the holidays? I'm now making sure I'm not overly dependent on them for anything, which I'd rather not spend time doing if I didn't need to.
Also a customer here, DatoCMS is fantastic product. We run hundreds of sites on their platform. Their team also works with you on pricing as you scale.
Congratulations on the success - you’re rightly proud, and that amount of cashflow brings real stability to owners and employees.
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!
> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table
100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me.
> you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy.
There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place...
> I’ve noticed over the years that as a general rule some European founders proudly care less about growth than American ones
I don't know if it's a Europe/America cultural difference. Probably, to some extent. We do care a lot about how we spend our lives outside of business. There’s a whole world beyond work that’s worth protecting :)
> If any mid-size company with functional distribution and tech wanted to take your business away, they could.
But why would they? For a "mere" €6.5M/year? We can optimize for the niche that the big players aren't even interested in. Being small and "ignorable" is its own form of defense.
> "in software it's grow or die."
I’m fine with this framing too, honestly. If this business ever runs its course, we have enough runway, experience, and optionality to start something new. There’s no inherent value to me in making a piece of software last for centuries.
What does matter is having a clear and fair exit plan for customers when that moment eventually comes.
> I hope you are writing the 20 year retrospective happily in 10 years from now
We'll see! :) Thanks for a genuinely thoughtful reply — I can tell where you're coming from. These are doubts I've wrestled with for years, and still do. I just keep landing in the same place (for now!).
> 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Same, I learned to code to build software for my business. I turned it into a SaaS and turned down investment because my original business was already profitable and making the SaaS better was making the business better.
This is why I trust software made by people who come from that industry or have some background. I’ve seen too many startups where the founders are fresh out of college and have never worked in that niche and have never been in the shoes of the people they are trying to sell to. To me, that just means they are trying to get big and get acquired, I’m just a means to that end.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm looking for companies that are small by intent, but also looking to scale sustainably and grow beyond the capabilities of a single person. There are a lot of small businesses / solopreneurs / freelancers who work enough to get by or do a few hundred $K as a salary replacement, but aren't looking to build anything bigger. A lot of those companies also go by the wayside when the founder retires, gets hired, or something happens. And there's already a lot of content and sources for those types of solopreneur / single founder freelancers / side hustle type businesses.
I'm looking for the other stories of small teams scaling big. I'm basically separating side-hustles and solopreneurs as freelancers from a more sustainable business. Revenue is a cutoff as a way to differentiate, but doesn't have to be the only one.
For sure however, a team of 5 doing $20M implies something significant is happening at scale versus a solopreneur making what would otherwise be salary-replacement level money. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love solopreneurship. Just trying to find those other stories, which are much harder to find.
I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!
Yeah and a lot of these are small only temporarily. Many of these startups are following the grow-at-all-costs VC philosophy that doesn't optimize for small team size. So I'm trying to find those alternate stories. Much harder to find, so when I see the post like this of OP's, I get excited. Hard to find stories of teams that are small by intent, but looking to scale big.
Something feels suspicious about those top three revenue numbers.
Another one from a fellow bootstrapper. I have been doing it for 10+ years with a small team as well. Haven't hit the same revenue as them but still a very good business and has provided me everything I have for last 10 years keeping 100% full control. It is really really hard to do it over such a long period and admire anyone who has done it even better than I have.
Kudos to you! What’s your current venture, if I may ask?
Run an LMS product. https://academyofmine.com Working on a big pivot for next year. Funny but the pivot is to go more headless but for learning platform. Would follow your journey going forward.
Another bootstrapper here. For 14 years. Here is our latest 2025 year in review, for anyone who's interested: https://community.intercoin.app/t/2025-year-in-review/2947
PS: This is not for lack of trying to raise VC, but the trying was not nearly on the level needed to actually raise it. Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman tried much harder to raise, with far, far less built. Part of me wishes I had done that. I'm open to advice as to how to raise properly, should it be a Seed round or Series A at this point, and how to get meetings with the VCs and herd the cats in a way that will actually be successful. For reference, I'm based in NYC.
PPS: I've had a lot more success and fun raising from angels (who make their own decisions about their own money) and remain open to it. Especially people who are aligned with what we're doing. I've found much of the VC signaling to be disingenuous (e.g. "we love funding startups who do X" actually means "we want dealflow and orbiters to get into rounds with large well-known VCs"). But maybe that's just my bias because I didn't pursue fundraising diligently enough.
Just give me 13 good (wo)men! And i’ll take the valley
Wow! Congrats to you and the team.
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!
Awesome to hear, thanks for sharing man! Enjoy! :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.
infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)
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.
Noted, thanks! :)
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.
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 ;)
After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!ahaha, true. on the other hand, wordpress is more 20 than 15 now :)
`Yet you rely on ${new Date().getFullYear() - 2005}-years-old solutions like Wordpress`
Congrats from a fellow software boostrapper (12 years in, similar size).
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?
I've been using Dato for years for private projects (would love a Hobby tier ;) ) and have been impressed with it from the start. Hearing that Dato and the people behind it are thriving makes me very happy! A success that's well deserved! :-D
Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.
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.
> 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.
Absolutely! There are some problems that can only be tackled with some serious funding. There are people who enjoy the go-go-go attitude of VC-based startups so much. I'm not against VC funding per se. It's just important to recognize that it's not the only path and that there's nothing wrong if that route isn't for you, for any reason. You can be successful in other ways.
Totally agree! Can't tell if I'm the go-go-go person anymore. So much stress...
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!
thank you! appreciate it :)
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?
email, I'm old fashioned! s.verna :)
Very cool on on the business model details! I love this model of doing it for multiple reasons.
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 a headless CMS. One place where editors can store and edit content, which is then exposed through a REST API so you can use it in your website, app, emails, etc…
Huge companies use it to centralise marketing copy and media.
Not just huge companies.. lots of web agencies [1] and mid-sized businesses use us to manage their web presence, mostly for the same reason: building custom sites quickly without the hassle of maintaining software. We’re not really optimized for huge websites (or customers).
[1]: https://www.datocms.com/partners/showcase
it's not hard to make something without funding, even by yourself, as long as you have the time and skill. but problem of the internet of today is saturation. you can have the best service or tool, much better than the number one on the market, but if you have no cash to burn on ads, you won't get anywhere.
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.
Starting in 2015 it makes more sense why a big win for them this year was getting typescript setup.
We've been using Dato for 5 years or so - a bit of a weird use case probably, we're driving configuration of our internal EHR with it. But it is very nice for creating a structured set of data models and then you've got a nice UI to input the data and a nice API for grabbing the data, all of which the engineering team didn't need to build.
It's been rock solid for us.
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.
In general, we try to keep things extremely simple. And then we simplify some more. If you're very strict on this basic rule and apply it at every level, from the start, you can go a long way with a small but stable team.
Regarding k8s: EKS is a very different beast compared to managing your own cluster in terms of complexity. We invested months into understanding a lot, yes, but then the day-to-day operations are not that heavy. At least, that's our opinion after 6 months; we'll see!
I would say k8s is a piece of software that enable teams to stay small. While the internals are insanely complex the developer experience is not that hard to learn.
I agree, though it takes some discipline to keep it simple and small. It can be really easy to let your clusters get huge, tools get complex, operator sprawl, etc. but keeping it simple and understandable is worth it in the long term.
The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.
The pricing page is messed up on Firefox
https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp
Ouch, I'm a Firefox user myself, but this one slipped! Thanks!
>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
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.
Define “successful Italian agency” :) If breaking even every year with 20+ employees counts as successful, then yes—successful. But I think you may have a mistaken idea of the level of support and investment that the “incubating” company actually provided. With the limited effort I put into this product over the years before it started to work, all I really needed was any stable job and a few hours each week. You don’t need a particularly favorable setup to pursue a bootstrapped approach... but you do need to be very comfortable with the timeline for seeing results.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That is a really nice comment, thank you a lot
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.
> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
I did say both open source and commercial, in the context of "starting a business around a new CMS", so you may be correct about the open source side of the market but that wasn't really what I was asking about.
The commercial/SaaS side specifically is quite crowded now, with lots of good options for businesses of all sizes.
That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.
Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.
> DatoCMS started in 2015 as an internal tool for our italian web agency.
Just trying to sit down and come up with a successful business is really hard. The few friends I have who have made it are engineers who left a company to do something related to what they already did. I even had a few who took funding and sold to the company they left.
> 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.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.
My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.
And huge kudos for doing it from Italy!
E andiamo! :)
Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!
Thank you thank you!
Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up!
If anyone at datocms is reading this: I find your blog post incredibly off-putting.
You're not the only one.
Sorry to hear. Why exactly?
Well, for a start, you guys brag about having great margins, which is not a problem in itself, but as a potential customer, it gives me the impression that the product could be cheaper.
Then it's all self-congratulatory, with overemphasis that I find lacking taste. Just my personal opinion...
Businesses have no issue with their suppliers making reasonable margins as long as the value offered is acceptable or better.
I'd rather know a supplier is healthy than scraping by. I just got an email from one of mine saying that they aren't doing great, so please buy as much as possible before the holidays? I'm now making sure I'm not overly dependent on them for anything, which I'd rather not spend time doing if I didn't need to.
As an actual customer, I have the opposite reaction. They are doing well and that gives me peace of mind.
Also a customer here, DatoCMS is fantastic product. We run hundreds of sites on their platform. Their team also works with you on pricing as you scale.
Congratulations on the success - you’re rightly proud, and that amount of cashflow brings real stability to owners and employees.
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!
> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table
100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me.
> you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy.
There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place...
> I’ve noticed over the years that as a general rule some European founders proudly care less about growth than American ones
I don't know if it's a Europe/America cultural difference. Probably, to some extent. We do care a lot about how we spend our lives outside of business. There’s a whole world beyond work that’s worth protecting :)
> If any mid-size company with functional distribution and tech wanted to take your business away, they could.
But why would they? For a "mere" €6.5M/year? We can optimize for the niche that the big players aren't even interested in. Being small and "ignorable" is its own form of defense.
> "in software it's grow or die."
I’m fine with this framing too, honestly. If this business ever runs its course, we have enough runway, experience, and optionality to start something new. There’s no inherent value to me in making a piece of software last for centuries.
What does matter is having a clear and fair exit plan for customers when that moment eventually comes.
> I hope you are writing the 20 year retrospective happily in 10 years from now
We'll see! :) Thanks for a genuinely thoughtful reply — I can tell where you're coming from. These are doubts I've wrestled with for years, and still do. I just keep landing in the same place (for now!).
Now rebrand as an AI agent company and raise at 1bn valuation /s