6 ms·

10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

326 points by steffoz 10mo ago

smurda 10mo ago
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!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  thank you! appreciate it :)
  - rexreed 10mo ago
    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?
    - steffoz 10mo ago
      email, I'm old fashioned! s.verna :)
Doches 10mo ago
> 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!
- abc123abc123 10mo ago
  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.
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      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.
      - steffoz 10mo ago
        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-stock-sale https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...
        jacquesm 10mo ago
        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.
        bpt3 10mo ago
- rexreed 10mo ago
  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?
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!
    - yobbo 10mo ago
      Something feels suspicious about those top three revenue numbers.
    - rexreed 10mo ago
      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.
    - kirso 10mo ago
      This is literally an anti-list of bootstrapped
  - jwr 10mo ago
    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.
    - rexreed 10mo ago
      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.
- jwr 10mo ago
  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!
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    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.
- codegeek 10mo ago
  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.
  - EGreg 10mo ago
    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 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.
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    Kudos to you! What’s your current venture, if I may ask?
    - codegeek 10mo ago
      Run an LMS product. https://academyofmine.com 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.
      - 10mo ago
- i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago
  Just give me 13 good (wo)men! And i’ll take the valley
- debarshri 10mo ago
  What you dont see is the pain behind the scenes of a bootstrapped org. It always looks rosy outside.
  - gerdesj 10mo ago
    Spin it!
    - debarshri 10mo ago
      To begin with theres always have cashflow issues. If it simple subscription based not so much but when it is more b2b enterprise stuff, theres always payment delays that can lead of delayed salaries.
      - achillean 10mo ago
        Maybe it depends on the type of business/ customers that you have because I've had the opposite experience. For us as a security SaaS, B2B enterprise is incredibly stable and predictable. B2C has a lot more variability and payment issues compared to large orgs with dedicated procurement departments, vendor processes etc.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- gerdesj 10mo ago
  Errm I think me and my mates count as bootstrappers. Never heard the term before but we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring. We have three Directors and a slack handful of employees, that varies around 15 to 25 depending on customers, pandemics, Brexit and murderous Russians. We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night. My top tip is to build up a current account balance that will cover the basics for your defined risk period. So, for us that period is six months. The basics are: Corporation tax, VAT and salaries. You'll note I don't mention director's remuneration - that's a nice to have (for me). I have two customers at the moment that are dealing with going bankrupt, although one looks like they will be OK. I refuse to join them. Small business cash flow is hard, really hard. It's so easy to be tempted to do something daft or to ignore warning signs. The world is a pretty hard place and not all tech companies get to spawn zillionares. You won't get to use my company as a poster child for funky ... whatever but we are still trading and I'm quite happy with that. Napoleon disparagingly described Britain as a "nation of shop keepers" - I'll take that and wear it as a badge of honour 8)
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    There's some real gems in this comment. > we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring We too like to call us boring :) This kind of boring is so good. > We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night. On one hand 25 years in business is a mind-blowing achievement. But at the same time, just "nice" is the right way to see it. Being comfortable and sleep well at night is exactly what we all want. You don't need to set the world on fire to be proud of what you do!
chrisrickard 10mo ago
Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  Thank you thank you!
jacquesm 10mo ago
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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    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.
  - arresin 10mo ago
    Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.
    - steffoz 10mo ago
      infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)
      - jacquesm 10mo ago
        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.
le-mark 10mo ago
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.
- kubb 10mo ago
  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.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > 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.
    - steffoz 10mo ago
      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.
isoprophlex 10mo ago
Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up!
antonhag 10mo ago
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. After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  ahaha, true. on the other hand, wordpress is more 20 than 15 now :)
  - asdfman123 10mo ago
    `Yet you rely on ${new Date().getFullYear() - 2005}-years-old solutions like Wordpress`
danielfalbo 10mo ago
And huge kudos for doing it from Italy!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  E andiamo! :)
sebstefan 10mo ago
The pricing page is messed up on Firefox https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp
- steffoz 10mo ago
  Ouch, I'm a Firefox user myself, but this one slipped! Thanks!
cwiggs 10mo ago
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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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!
- anderspetersson 10mo ago
  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.
  - yabones 10mo ago
    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.
d--b 10mo ago
If anyone at datocms is reading this: I find your blog post incredibly off-putting.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  Sorry to hear. Why exactly?
  - d--b 10mo ago
    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...
    - dminor 10mo ago
      As an actual customer, I have the opposite reaction. They are doing well and that gives me peace of mind.
      - hellojebus 10mo ago
        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.
        lippihom 9mo ago
        Not in my experience at all. Very solid product but incredibly frustrating trying to negotiate / get a bit of wiggle room in regards to pricing. My plan auto-renewed for 2026 but it's become a priority to move everything off of Dato to another CMS for 2027.
    - bpt3 10mo ago
      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.
trm217 10mo ago
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
- burningChrome 10mo ago
  Same here. Been with them since the beginning (or what felt like the beginning) and have always been impressed with their constant drive to get out new features and make sure their core stuff is still rock solid. Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.
asim 10mo ago
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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - asim 10mo ago
    Totally agree! Can't tell if I'm the go-go-go person anymore. So much stress...
OtherShrezzing 10mo ago
>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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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.
vessenes 10mo ago
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!
dminor 10mo ago
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.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
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?
- dreadnip 10mo ago
  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.
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    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 https://www.datocms.com/partners/showcase
gethly 10mo ago
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). --- 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.
- ericmcer 10mo ago
  Starting in 2015 it makes more sense why a big win for them this year was getting typescript setup.
iagooar 10mo ago
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!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  Awesome to hear, thanks for sharing man! Enjoy! :)
- kirso 10mo ago
  Would love to read more on this, any blog post or writing available? Big kudos. Such an inspiration.
botswana99 10mo ago
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-a-founder-who-not-only-lost-activity-7406713966317584384-Dggw 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?
nextworddev 10mo ago
Now rebrand as an AI agent company and raise at 1bn valuation /s
swyx 10mo ago
> we achieved an EBIT margin of 65% 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?
- 0x3f 10mo ago
  It's Europe; salaries suck across the board. That's the market, so there are no competing offers. Then again it's incredibly hard to fire people. Maybe they should start a union after all.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    I don’t give employees (and stable freelancers/contractors) the minimum I can get away with; I give them a fair share of the profits on top of their regular salary. I’m not sure how common this model is in Europe, but it has certainly helped me keep my best employee with me throughout the entire journey and feel much less alone in my decisions—especially at the beginning, when things are harder. Plus, it's just more fun to share when you can.
  - trm217 10mo ago
    What are you even referring to? Salaries in many European countries are perfectly fine when compared to the costs of living etc. Inflated salaries with inflated prices for everything else aren‘t just better because the number is higher ^^
    - rkomorn 10mo ago
      There's more to it than just "inflated salaries with inflated prices". I took a 70% pay cut moving from Silicon Valley back to Europe. Sure, my monthly expenses were also about 70% less, and I was able to save roughly the same relative proportion of money. The main difference is that, in absolute terms, what I was saving in the US before I moved amounted to more than what I was taking home after tax in Europe, let alone saving. That buying power went much farther (for a variety of reasons). Whether it was electronics, trips, a new car, etc, I could afford way more luxury there, with much less impact to my bottom line. I have no regrets. My perceived quality of life is much better now.
swyx 10mo ago
> We spent the winter prototyping (experimenting with everything from bare metal to alternative PaaS providers — some of which shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?
- steffoz 10mo ago
  For us it was a performance issue. We load tested DBs and servers with our real app and found out Heroku (notoriously known for being stuck in 2010) performed better then some more recent competitor.
  - swyx 10mo ago
    very nice! i like seeing Heroku and Digital Ocean hang in there and win
debarshri 10mo ago
I have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out. 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.
gigatexal 10mo ago
That’s only 50k euros per employee if taking 650k per year. What am I missing?
- lurk2 10mo ago
  It’s €6,500,000 just this year, so €500,000 per employee.
  - gigatexal 10mo ago
    Oh. Yeah that’s very different then. My bad.
- zola 10mo ago
  6.5M is Annual Recurring Revenue, so it's 500k per employee.
jeffreyq 10mo ago
Extraordinary win, why not be profitable with strong growth without major dilution? Hope to see you guys being written about in the same fashion as https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-cloudinary https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-c... down the road.
deaux 10mo ago
Cool read. So where are the "bootstrapped founder" communities? We're here right now commenting about this on the biggest VC community out there. I get that the flashiness and capital of VC means that this will always attract 100x more people. But it seems strange that there aren't any (?) for bootstrapped founders.. at all. Unless it's just Indiehackers? But the vibes there seem very different from the ones of DatoCMS. Maybe I'm just misreading the room though. Or maybe there's an opportunity here?
lippihom 9mo ago
Great product but quite onerous pricing / rates. 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!

326 points by steffoz 10mo ago

smurda 10mo ago

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!

steffoz 10mo ago
thank you! appreciate it :)
- rexreed 10mo ago
  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?
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    email, I'm old fashioned! s.verna :)

Doches 10mo ago

> 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!

abc123abc123 10mo ago
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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    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.
    - steffoz 10mo ago
      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-stock-sale https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...
      - jacquesm 10mo ago
        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.
        bpt3 10mo ago
rexreed 10mo ago
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?
- steffoz 10mo ago
  I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!
  - yobbo 10mo ago
    Something feels suspicious about those top three revenue numbers.
  - rexreed 10mo ago
    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.
  - kirso 10mo ago
    This is literally an anti-list of bootstrapped
- jwr 10mo ago
  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.
  - rexreed 10mo ago
    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.
jwr 10mo ago
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!
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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.
codegeek 10mo ago
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.
- EGreg 10mo ago
  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 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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  Kudos to you! What’s your current venture, if I may ask?
  - codegeek 10mo ago
    Run an LMS product. https://academyofmine.com 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.
    - 10mo ago
i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago
Just give me 13 good (wo)men! And i’ll take the valley
debarshri 10mo ago
What you dont see is the pain behind the scenes of a bootstrapped org. It always looks rosy outside.
- gerdesj 10mo ago
  Spin it!
  - debarshri 10mo ago
    To begin with theres always have cashflow issues. If it simple subscription based not so much but when it is more b2b enterprise stuff, theres always payment delays that can lead of delayed salaries.
    - achillean 10mo ago
      Maybe it depends on the type of business/ customers that you have because I've had the opposite experience. For us as a security SaaS, B2B enterprise is incredibly stable and predictable. B2C has a lot more variability and payment issues compared to large orgs with dedicated procurement departments, vendor processes etc.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
gerdesj 10mo ago
Errm I think me and my mates count as bootstrappers. Never heard the term before but we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring. We have three Directors and a slack handful of employees, that varies around 15 to 25 depending on customers, pandemics, Brexit and murderous Russians. We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night. My top tip is to build up a current account balance that will cover the basics for your defined risk period. So, for us that period is six months. The basics are: Corporation tax, VAT and salaries. You'll note I don't mention director's remuneration - that's a nice to have (for me). I have two customers at the moment that are dealing with going bankrupt, although one looks like they will be OK. I refuse to join them. Small business cash flow is hard, really hard. It's so easy to be tempted to do something daft or to ignore warning signs. The world is a pretty hard place and not all tech companies get to spawn zillionares. You won't get to use my company as a poster child for funky ... whatever but we are still trading and I'm quite happy with that. Napoleon disparagingly described Britain as a "nation of shop keepers" - I'll take that and wear it as a badge of honour 8)
- steffoz 10mo ago
  There's some real gems in this comment. > we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring We too like to call us boring :) This kind of boring is so good. > We incorporated in 2000. 25 years later, we are still trading, which is nice. We will never fiddle with unicorns or set the world on fire, we just want to get along comfortably and be able to sleep at night. On one hand 25 years in business is a mind-blowing achievement. But at the same time, just "nice" is the right way to see it. Being comfortable and sleep well at night is exactly what we all want. You don't need to set the world on fire to be proud of what you do!

chrisrickard 10mo ago

Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!

steffoz 10mo ago
Thank you thank you!

jacquesm 10mo ago

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.

steffoz 10mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  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.
- arresin 10mo ago
  Did you keep a blog during the early days? Wouldn’t mind reading it if so.
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      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.

le-mark 10mo ago

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.

kubb 10mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - steffoz 10mo ago
    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.

isoprophlex 10mo ago

Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up!

antonhag 10mo ago

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. After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!

steffoz 10mo ago
ahaha, true. on the other hand, wordpress is more 20 than 15 now :)
- asdfman123 10mo ago
  `Yet you rely on ${new Date().getFullYear() - 2005}-years-old solutions like Wordpress`

danielfalbo 10mo ago

And huge kudos for doing it from Italy!

steffoz 10mo ago
E andiamo! :)

sebstefan 10mo ago

The pricing page is messed up on Firefox https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp

steffoz 10mo ago
Ouch, I'm a Firefox user myself, but this one slipped! Thanks!

cwiggs 10mo ago

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.

steffoz 10mo ago
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!
anderspetersson 10mo ago
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.
- yabones 10mo ago
  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.

d--b 10mo ago

If anyone at datocms is reading this: I find your blog post incredibly off-putting.

steffoz 10mo ago
Sorry to hear. Why exactly?
- d--b 10mo ago
  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...
  - dminor 10mo ago
    As an actual customer, I have the opposite reaction. They are doing well and that gives me peace of mind.
    - hellojebus 10mo ago
      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.
      - lippihom 9mo ago
        Not in my experience at all. Very solid product but incredibly frustrating trying to negotiate / get a bit of wiggle room in regards to pricing. My plan auto-renewed for 2026 but it's become a priority to move everything off of Dato to another CMS for 2027.
  - bpt3 10mo ago
    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.

trm217 10mo ago

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

burningChrome 10mo ago
Same here. Been with them since the beginning (or what felt like the beginning) and have always been impressed with their constant drive to get out new features and make sure their core stuff is still rock solid. Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.

asim 10mo ago

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.

steffoz 10mo ago
> 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.
- asim 10mo ago
  Totally agree! Can't tell if I'm the go-go-go person anymore. So much stress...

OtherShrezzing 10mo ago

>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.

steffoz 10mo ago
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.

vessenes 10mo ago

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!

dminor 10mo ago

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.

the__alchemist 10mo ago

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?

dreadnip 10mo ago
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.
- steffoz 10mo ago
  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 https://www.datocms.com/partners/showcase

gethly 10mo ago

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). --- 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.

ericmcer 10mo ago
Starting in 2015 it makes more sense why a big win for them this year was getting typescript setup.

iagooar 10mo ago

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!

steffoz 10mo ago
Awesome to hear, thanks for sharing man! Enjoy! :)
kirso 10mo ago
Would love to read more on this, any blog post or writing available? Big kudos. Such an inspiration.

botswana99 10mo ago

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-a-founder-who-not-only-lost-activity-7406713966317584384-Dggw 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?

nextworddev 10mo ago

Now rebrand as an AI agent company and raise at 1bn valuation /s

swyx 10mo ago

> we achieved an EBIT margin of 65% 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?

0x3f 10mo ago
It's Europe; salaries suck across the board. That's the market, so there are no competing offers. Then again it's incredibly hard to fire people. Maybe they should start a union after all.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- steffoz 10mo ago
  I don’t give employees (and stable freelancers/contractors) the minimum I can get away with; I give them a fair share of the profits on top of their regular salary. I’m not sure how common this model is in Europe, but it has certainly helped me keep my best employee with me throughout the entire journey and feel much less alone in my decisions—especially at the beginning, when things are harder. Plus, it's just more fun to share when you can.
- trm217 10mo ago
  What are you even referring to? Salaries in many European countries are perfectly fine when compared to the costs of living etc. Inflated salaries with inflated prices for everything else aren‘t just better because the number is higher ^^
  - rkomorn 10mo ago
    There's more to it than just "inflated salaries with inflated prices". I took a 70% pay cut moving from Silicon Valley back to Europe. Sure, my monthly expenses were also about 70% less, and I was able to save roughly the same relative proportion of money. The main difference is that, in absolute terms, what I was saving in the US before I moved amounted to more than what I was taking home after tax in Europe, let alone saving. That buying power went much farther (for a variety of reasons). Whether it was electronics, trips, a new car, etc, I could afford way more luxury there, with much less impact to my bottom line. I have no regrets. My perceived quality of life is much better now.

swyx 10mo ago

> We spent the winter prototyping (experimenting with everything from bare metal to alternative PaaS providers — some of which shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?

steffoz 10mo ago
For us it was a performance issue. We load tested DBs and servers with our real app and found out Heroku (notoriously known for being stuck in 2010) performed better then some more recent competitor.
- swyx 10mo ago
  very nice! i like seeing Heroku and Digital Ocean hang in there and win

debarshri 10mo ago

I have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out. 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.

gigatexal 10mo ago

That’s only 50k euros per employee if taking 650k per year. What am I missing?

lurk2 10mo ago
It’s €6,500,000 just this year, so €500,000 per employee.
- gigatexal 10mo ago
  Oh. Yeah that’s very different then. My bad.
zola 10mo ago
6.5M is Annual Recurring Revenue, so it's 500k per employee.

jeffreyq 10mo ago

Extraordinary win, why not be profitable with strong growth without major dilution? Hope to see you guys being written about in the same fashion as https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-cloudinary https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-c... down the road.

deaux 10mo ago

Cool read. So where are the "bootstrapped founder" communities? We're here right now commenting about this on the biggest VC community out there. I get that the flashiness and capital of VC means that this will always attract 100x more people. But it seems strange that there aren't any (?) for bootstrapped founders.. at all. Unless it's just Indiehackers? But the vibes there seem very different from the ones of DatoCMS. Maybe I'm just misreading the room though. Or maybe there's an opportunity here?

lippihom 9mo ago

Great product but quite onerous pricing / rates. 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!