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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see more of this in tech startups. Especially with all the free info from groups like Y Combinator that's online to help them. Just people in college, on summer break, or even retirement just cranking out code for a platform and doing sales trying to make it work. Should be more success stories out of it. I think most of these people just try to do too much themselves without external support both as a sounding board on their ideas and for how to run a startup. They probably read business books more tailored to lifestyle businesses and such whereas a startup has different rules.

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This is exactly what I've been doing. It started with me coding the MVP myself with a little help from a summer intern and then me aggressively handling all sales myself until I reached a 5+ figure MRR where I could finally start to delegate some of that work to others.

Now we are growing like any other startup would, just instead of being fueled by VC funding, we are being fueled by all of the profits from all of the selling I was able to do and all of the word of mouth that happened afterwards.

You've probably never heard of me and no media outlet cares about me because I started as a not so sexy B2B, but the company and its products are growing much more ambitious in scope as we are getting the capital to do so, and now we are in the same position as many other VC funded companies, except I have 100% equity and don't have to worry about searching for a way to become profitable or running out of money since the second I decide to stop reinvesting everything into growth the company will instantly be extremely profitable.

Fantastic story, really neat to see you making it in this way. That's real entrepreneurship. The only thing that can hurt you is some venture backed start-up going aggressively after your customers by undercutting you until they run out of cash.

Great story. Congratulations. This part...

"except I have 100% equity and don't have to worry about searching for a way to become profitable or running out of money since the second I decide to stop reinvesting everything into growth the company will instantly be extremely profitable."

...is the grand finale that comes with VC-less businesses. :)

I've heard of you. You're a pretty famous guy! ;)

WordAI?

That was the feeling I got from the startup community about ten years ago — lots more bootstrapped, single-person, not-so-sexy startups.

These days, since startups are much more fashionable, it feels like it's the majority of startups are all about getting VC funding and ran by much more "idea" people.

Bootstrapped, sold to a publicly-traded corporation, set for life, and nobody knows who the heck you are. Perfect!

Lots of people did it. Getting real shit done post crash was a glorious time.

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