4 ms·

Could you give some examples of those that do well?

• IgorPartola 12y ago
  Instagram. I am not a fan of the product, but their story is the poster child for "we can't spend millions on the thing we want to build, so let's build the smallest possible thing that'll work and iterate."
  • nailer 12y ago
    Didn't they already build something pretty big with Burbn?
• adventured 12y ago
  PlentyOfFish, pure bootstrapping. Wikipedia, while not a for-profit company, had to operate in a lot of ways from day one like any other startup. They control costs quite well given their immense scale. Microsoft was fanatical about controlling costs. They were very profitable from early on. GitHub was founded in 2008, and only took their first major venture capital in 2012. The business funded (or close to funded) itself from very early on. Craigslist never took venture capital. Funded itself by very low costs of operation, and a minimum revenue approach. 37signals, from what I know, never took any major venture capital and was bootstrapped. Here's another list: http://37signals.com/bootstrapped http://37signals.com/bootstrapped
  • 650REDHAIR 12y ago
    Outside of Microsoft I don't think any of those companies are valued at $1B. Fab was swinging for the fences and struck out.