10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
datocms.com
datocms.com
Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!
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.
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.
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/founders-guide-to-secondary...
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.
Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years.
I hear this all the time with variations to the number of years, which makes me suspect it isn’t true.
Starting and maintaining a functioning business is difficult; the default outcome is failure (the end of the business as an operating entity) and you have to work to prevent that from happening every day that you want to remain open.
And I've never seen a claim that the majority of businesses fail in a year. Most anecdotes say a majority fail within 5 years, which seems to be approximately correct based on US data.
This is why I trust software made by people who come from that industry or have some background. I’ve seen too many startups where the founders are fresh out of college and have never worked in that niche and have never been in the shoes of the people they are trying to sell to. To me, that just means they are trying to get big and get acquired, I’m just a means to that end.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
Big kudos. Such an inspiration.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Huge companies use it to centralise marketing copy and media.
It's been rock solid for us.
mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?
For a laugh, here is our founder chat from this weekend:
GB: 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?
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!
Hope to see you guys being written about in the same fashion as https://www.bvp.com/atlas/bootstrapping-to-100-million-arr-c...
down the road.
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).
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable.
It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time.
Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?
It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
The commercial/SaaS side specifically is quite crowded now, with lots of good options for businesses of all sizes.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.
Just trying to sit down and come up with a successful business is really hard. The few friends I have who have made it are engineers who left a company to do something related to what they already did. I even had a few who took funding and sold to the company they left.
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.
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!
100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me.
> you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy.
There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place...
> I’ve noticed over the years that as a general rule some European founders proudly care less about growth than American ones
I don't know if it's a Europe/America cultural difference. Probably, to some extent. We do care a lot about how we spend our lives outside of business. There’s a whole world beyond work that’s worth protecting :)
> If any mid-size company with functional distribution and tech wanted to take your business away, they could.
But why would they? For a "mere" €6.5M/year? We can optimize for the niche that the big players aren't even interested in. Being small and "ignorable" is its own form of defense.
> "in software it's grow or die."
I’m fine with this framing too, honestly. If this business ever runs its course, we have enough runway, experience, and optionality to start something new. There’s no inherent value to me in making a piece of software last for centuries.
What does matter is having a clear and fair exit plan for customers when that moment eventually comes.
> I hope you are writing the 20 year retrospective happily in 10 years from now
We'll see! :) Thanks for a genuinely thoughtful reply — I can tell where you're coming from. These are doubts I've wrestled with for years, and still do. I just keep landing in the same place (for now!).
Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.
VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.
There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.
As a thought experiment, I just googled up small Italian tech companies that are publicly traded, and found, for example, DHH - an Italian hosting and content services company trading on Borsa Italiana (Growth I presume, it's a very small company) - earnings of 3.7m euros right now on a slow growing ~30m+ in revenue, market cap of 110m or so as far as I can tell. Were they to add 3.5m in net income to their company, their market cap would likely push to 150+m -- they'd have doubled their earnings. So, it might be worth 50+mm to them (or quite possibly a lot more if they could pair that with some growth and more exploitative margins) to pick this niche up.
To be clear, I wasn't pushing you toward a hyper growth strategy; it wouldn't suit you, and I think the CMS market probably isn't suitable in any event, even if you wanted to.
But, maybe a way to think of it is this, while there is risk in any strategy, it's worth minimizing the risks of any chosen strategy as part of your responsibility to your stakeholders (employees, family, shareholders, customers, self -- choose your preferred order).
In this case, if I were on your board, knowing the infinitely small amount I do about you guys, I'd probably suggest you at least have a structured growth plan in place -- that is, have growth targets, understand how to drive them, and assess success as you go. Nothing about that implies accidental enshittification or cultural rot; just managing this aspect of your business as well. If you haven't been doing that so far, when/if you need these skills, you'll be glad you have them. In the interim exercising them gets you more control of your destiny, whether that's aimed at getting everybody more time off for things that matter or cash or hitting the next 'stable' size of organization -- it's more that the tool is a useful one to develop.
As far as deciding what to do - always the founder's curse/blessing! I'm on the side of developing as much of a toolbox as possible, it just adds optionality. Keep it up!
I disagree. I work for a similar company, and what customers appreciate is how solid the software is, the dedicated, straightforward and competent customer support, the lack of enshittification and rent-seeking. You tend to not get that with large or high-growth companies. They may nominally provide the same API, but everything else is more likely to be a pain.
Then it's all self-congratulatory, with overemphasis that I find lacking taste. Just my personal opinion...
My plan auto-renewed for 2026 but it's become a priority to move everything off of Dato to another CMS for 2027.
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.
It's the classic single gas station in the middle of nowhere argument. Without volume, they can't reasonably survive without charging more per unit - if competition shows up, one of them will inevitably go out of business due to the reduced margins.
I understand that most people who do it as a habit are often mostly exaggerating, and that's what doesn't really inspire me.
In Texas there's a common saying, "No brag, just fact."