10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
16 comments
·December 23, 2025jacquesm
steffoz
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 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.
Doches
> We're not bragging (okay, we're bragging a little) but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!
abc123abc123
This is the way! As a fellow bootstrapper let me also add the infinite value of peace of mind. Your business is your own, and you can focus on earnings, quality of life, growth, what ever you like, without annoying VC:s and investors telling you what to do.
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.
steffoz
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.
jacquesm
Not only that, the vast bulk of unicorn wanna-be's end up failing (sometimes failing upwards though) and then it is all for nothing.
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.
rexreed
YES! I want to find more stories like this. Where can I find Bootstrappers or seedstrappers who have successfully scaled their companies past a few million in revenue with very small teams?
steffoz
I know https://tinyteams.xyz/ but it's not specific to bootstrapped companies!
le-mark
The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.
smurda
Wow. Huge congrats! This is a real business that is profitable.
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!
isoprophlex
Thanks for setting a counter-example to the vc money bullshit hustle crowd. Keep it up!
chrisrickard
Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!
steffoz
Thank you thank you!
That's excellent by any metric. Most larger successful companies have a very hard time consistently breaking the 200K / employee / year turnover level and this is 2.5 times that. On top of that they are indestructible, with that much left on the table a couple of years of solid saving and you can start thinking about much larger projects, and still without outside financing.
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.