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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

This 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.

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Do 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias

How many people/companies start blogs and don't succeed like you guys did?

Plenty, 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.

looking forward to hit the $1M mark and be featured by you guys :)

Hitting $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.

"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.

I notice you took the low end of the scale. I wonder if there are many 100MM+ companies that bootstrapped.

Is 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?

with 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.

The 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.

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