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Profitable and proud: Campaign Monitor
- sosuke 16y agoThe series sounds like it could be really great, I wonder if they have a frequency for new interviews planned already? The series title alone got me though, as someone who is working on a startup that is something I really aspire to be, profitable and proud. Campaign Monitor is a great service too, I frequently reference and share their Guide to CSS support http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ to coworkers who have questions on what can and can't be done with styling in emails.
- dhh 16y agoWe have a couple of other companies lined up but there's no schedule yet. Hopefully we'll start getting a steady flow of suggestions for companies that fit the profile and do something every couple of weeks.
- jasonfried 16y agoWe had about a dozen other companies get in touch with us today re: their story. So more articles are on the way.
- davidw 16y agoThis looks like it could be pretty interesting. 37signals feels like something of an outlier to me: they talk a good game, but I don't really get the feeling that I could do something similar, because I don't have a hugely popular blog, nor did I create an extremely popular web framework.
- dhh 16y agoDo you know who else didn't use to have a popular blog? 37signals. When Basecamp launched, we had something like 4,000 readers of SvN. Now that's a fair chunk, but certainly not unobtainable.
- rguzman 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias How many people/companies start blogs and don't succeed like you guys did?
- jasonfried 16y agoPlenty, but it's a lot easier for a company to bootstrap and hit $1MM in revenues and be profitable than it is to be the next Apple or Google or younameit.
- cedsav 16y agolooking forward to hit the $1M mark and be featured by you guys :)
- rguzman 16y agoHitting $1MM in revenues strikes me as "about as difficult" as raising a series A if not harder. However, having to bootstrap places constraints on the type of product/company one can build. There is also the time factor. Some products have a right time and place and bootstrapping may lead to missing a window of opportunity. Trying to be the next google or younameit is playing the lottery, no argument there. Bootstrapping to $10-100MM strikes me about as unlikely as being the next google.
- jasonfried 16y ago"Bootstrapping to $10-100MM strikes me about as unlikely as being the next google." That's not even a contest. $10MM+ bootstrapped companies are far more common than "being the next Google." More stories on the way.
- corruption 16y agoI notice you took the low end of the scale. I wonder if there are many 100MM+ companies that bootstrapped.
- blantonl 16y agowith tools like Amazon Web services, Basecamp, Github, Chargify, and loads of other building blocks, do you realize how easy it is for a single individual to take an idea to concept to large service quickly? This 37Signals post, and subsequent ones, should inspire you, not discourage you.
- _delirium 16y agoThe problem isn't so much the building-something as the building-something-popular, though. Since, as you point out, it's easy for a single individual to build large services these days, many thousands of single individuals are doing just that, so there's a lot of competition for attention/users/readers/etc.
- patio11 16y agoIs there anything stopping you from creating a modestly successful blog or a piece of OSS which solves a big problem in an underserved niche for very gabby programmers?