steffoz

Love it!

A bit! By having a non strict published_at ordering, but grouping by author, I definitely feel like a know more about the people behind their blogs!

I like the idea very much! No code available yet? :)

Great! And funny too, just posted about my personal take on the same topic: https://squeaki.sh/p/i-turned-my-website-into-my-feed-reader...

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!

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.

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.

But employees get a part of the cake too! If profits are high, we all celebrate together! During 2025, 7% of the profits have been shared with our employees (and stable freelancers). In 2024 it was 6%.

https://www.datocms.com/company/profit-sharing

Awesome to hear, thanks for sharing man! Enjoy! :)

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

Kudos to you! What’s your current venture, if I may ask?

> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table

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!).

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.

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.

> 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.

E andiamo! :)

That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.

That is a really nice comment, thank you a lot

Ouch, I'm a Firefox user myself, but this one slipped! Thanks!

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!

ahaha, true. on the other hand, wordpress is more 20 than 15 now :)

Noted, thanks! :)

Sorry to hear. Why exactly?

infortunately not.. too low self-esteem at the time to think that would have been interesting for anyone :)

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.

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...

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.

I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!

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.

Thank you thank you!