It isn’t less ”funding” because of that. I am pretty sure that having the reassurance of this investment helped with the long term mindset that led Basecamp to be such a big company.
It is less funding. They didn't need the money. Maybe you also want to call profits "funding" because they help with the mindset of building a company.
It also at the same time is one less successful example of someone finding a way to make millions of dollars without raising any funding.
Every time I see someone using Basecamp as inspiration for bootstrappers I perceive it as very dishonest.
That said, I think it is a very good thing that there are more options for funding high growth tech startups that do not require a ”go unicorn or go bust” mindset of the VCs.
It certainly a great innovation (even if it’s not exactly a new idea) in the startup ecosystem
> Every time I see someone using Basecamp as inspiration for bootstrappers I perceive it as very dishonest
How far are you willing to take this?
What if he had borrowed money from his grandma? What if they couldn't afford servers AND rent so they stayed with his parents? Or they couldn't get a lease on their own, so a friend co-signed?
The reality is that we all accept some form of help with our businesses at one point or another that takes some of our stress away. You'd be searching long and hard to find people who became successful with no form of investment at all. And even if you did, what would that prove?
It proves nothing to you, I draw the lines of my perceptions to my own benefit.
I believe every bootstrapper has some kind of self-funding. So whenever I see a story of a successful bootstrapper, I assume self-funding, and I don't consider it dishonest in my perception of the story. If the bootstrapper happens to be a millionaire already, and the "self-funding" is in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don't consider the inspiration applicable to my own case, but I would probably not call it "dishonest".
All of your small-money examples look to me as in this category as both honest and applicable to my case.
One of the lines that I draw is that calling "bootstrapper" a company that received, let's say $100,000, from a billionaire in order to help with growth is dishonest in my perception.
From the tone of your comment, you seem to have the impression that I am a purist of some sort about the technical definition of "bootstrapper" and that I am policing how other people use it as some sort of crusade. You are wrong. I was sharing the filter that I use when interpreting this kind of story. I create these filters because I am a wanna-be founder myself, and I have decisions to make, decisions that are influenced by what I read about what happened to other people. I have to establish a gross probability of success with each decision. Deciding to pursue funding is one of those decisions. So when I read about bootstrappers I try to filter as honest or dishonest (also along other dimensions, as applicability).
So this search of mine of what I consider honest or not would prove nothing to you or to anyone. I don't care. It is not the reason I do it.
I agree. ‘Indie’ had a distinct meaning that has now been co-opted by marketers and warped and changed by usage. One’s own meaning and usage is still valid, as is talking about variations and change in usage. Linguistic prescriptivism is often misapplied in ways to discourage descriptivist usage of the the same term, ‘indie’ in this case.
Basecamp would be close enough to where it is now with or without Bezos’ stake. Assuming they aren’t lying. The most it did was let them get a bit more aggressive on growth vs profit since they had less skin in the game and the PR received from the funding. Which would’ve been big but not that big of a deal back in 06.
Is Atlassian not bootstrapped to you either? Or 1Password? They both took money super late into their game or for taking money off the table. i can see saying Atlassian or GitHub aren’t bootstrapped, but things are different these days. In prior years they may have just IPOed.
> Then in 2006, it suddenly happened from one day to the next. Jeff Bezos had taken an interest in Basecamp, and Jason and I each sold him a minority, no-control stake of our share of the company for a few million dollars each (Basecamp had been self-funded and profitable from the start, so didn’t need any capital for the venture).
DHH has stated that they were already profitable by that point, and that they took the Bezos money off the table. I.e. It wasn’t invested into the business.
Being independent isn't a binary yes/no thing. But people who built their business from their own savings are a lot more independent than people who took investment, whatever the source.
"Indie" has been marketed into meaninglessness like "Agile", "Hacker" or "Mindfulness". These terms usually lose their meaning once they go mainstream and become cool.
I've been a full-time 'indie' computer game developer for about five years now and in the gamedev space 'indie' hasn't really meant any one thing for most of the last decade. I'm a solo guy who does art & animation, programming, writing, marketing, and so on (I have an accountant and I contracts a friend who helps with the music), working on original IP, with no outside inventment, self-publishing - which is about as 'indie' as it gets, I suppose. However, 'indie' is often applied to teams of 20+ people, sometimes either with outside investment, or who work with publishing companies. Lots of publishers are 'indie publishers' too, operations are built to work with smaller teams and budgets.
And I'm totally fine with all of that! Proclaiming that "I'm indier than thou" might get you some (utterly meaningless) clout with... well, I don't know who. The main thing is I find encouraging is there's a number of proven ways to run a sustainable software business. And that's nice to know, because if at some point I need to or want to change how I'm doing things, it isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario.
How is your game coming along? I've always wanted to make a game (like probably 50% of developers). It's just so much work I can never manage to commit to it long enough to make something.
I've been working on this one for multiple years now, commitment and the art of Finishing Things is perhaps more important than any individual skill-set like programming. Obviously individual skill-sets are important, but you could be the greatest at everything and it's not worth very much if you're _also_ very good at giving up.. In my experience, the first 10% of working on a game is great fun because you're trying different things out, experimenting! And then you have to finish the thing - and getting a decent product to market is a hard slog whether it is a video game or not.
Simple advice to anyone interested in making games - make something small and simple in a single weekend, a snake clone or something, and then go from there.
Sure! The 'minimum requirements' on the Steam store page is basically my Windows computer, and the Macbook I have ;) For previous games I used to support Ubuntu Linux too, but the cost of supporting such a limited player base didn't work out for me, sorry Linux people, maybe again one day!
I use Unity (currently 2019.3, probably moving to 2020 soon, for the new v2 of the Hybrid Renderer package) and C#. Photoshop for painting with an Wacom Intuos 5 tablet (Adobe Script for slicing and exporting), Spine for animating (highly recommended! Check out esotericsoftware.com), Modo for all my 3D needs. Git for version control, Gitlab for hosting, and lots of Python and Django for the web service parts of my current game, as well as my website. Lots of Google Sheets for marketing and accounting.
And, of course, paper and pens to doodle and make notes and keep track of where everything is at and what I'm working on next.
Haha, Flash Games were where I got my start doing games commercially, back in 2009! You could license them to different arcade websites and publishers, it was pretty good money for a student.
When I depended on poker for my income, I always thought one should work up to the next higher-stake game by building a bankroll at one's current level. People who moved up in betting limits via someone else's money rarely survived there (the level of play tends to increase with higher stakes).
I see a fair amount of discussion about the "what is indie" angle here, but I most appreciated this article for pointing out various funding options that do not carry hyper-growth expectations. I suppose taking any money at all violates the rules of my previous paragraph, but it still seems closer in spirit than traditional VC. I don't know that I'll ever attempt to start a business again, but if I did, I would certainly look more into those options.
26 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadIt's a common misconception to think that Basecamp never took any investment but in fact they did from Jeff Bezos.
https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
That said, it helps prove the OP point that's it's possible to raise funds and remain independent.
Every time I see someone using Basecamp as inspiration for bootstrappers I perceive it as very dishonest.
That said, I think it is a very good thing that there are more options for funding high growth tech startups that do not require a ”go unicorn or go bust” mindset of the VCs.
It certainly a great innovation (even if it’s not exactly a new idea) in the startup ecosystem
How far are you willing to take this?
What if he had borrowed money from his grandma? What if they couldn't afford servers AND rent so they stayed with his parents? Or they couldn't get a lease on their own, so a friend co-signed?
The reality is that we all accept some form of help with our businesses at one point or another that takes some of our stress away. You'd be searching long and hard to find people who became successful with no form of investment at all. And even if you did, what would that prove?
I believe every bootstrapper has some kind of self-funding. So whenever I see a story of a successful bootstrapper, I assume self-funding, and I don't consider it dishonest in my perception of the story. If the bootstrapper happens to be a millionaire already, and the "self-funding" is in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don't consider the inspiration applicable to my own case, but I would probably not call it "dishonest".
All of your small-money examples look to me as in this category as both honest and applicable to my case.
One of the lines that I draw is that calling "bootstrapper" a company that received, let's say $100,000, from a billionaire in order to help with growth is dishonest in my perception.
From the tone of your comment, you seem to have the impression that I am a purist of some sort about the technical definition of "bootstrapper" and that I am policing how other people use it as some sort of crusade. You are wrong. I was sharing the filter that I use when interpreting this kind of story. I create these filters because I am a wanna-be founder myself, and I have decisions to make, decisions that are influenced by what I read about what happened to other people. I have to establish a gross probability of success with each decision. Deciding to pursue funding is one of those decisions. So when I read about bootstrappers I try to filter as honest or dishonest (also along other dimensions, as applicability).
So this search of mine of what I consider honest or not would prove nothing to you or to anyone. I don't care. It is not the reason I do it.
Is Atlassian not bootstrapped to you either? Or 1Password? They both took money super late into their game or for taking money off the table. i can see saying Atlassian or GitHub aren’t bootstrapped, but things are different these days. In prior years they may have just IPOed.
> Then in 2006, it suddenly happened from one day to the next. Jeff Bezos had taken an interest in Basecamp, and Jason and I each sold him a minority, no-control stake of our share of the company for a few million dollars each (Basecamp had been self-funded and profitable from the start, so didn’t need any capital for the venture).
And I'm totally fine with all of that! Proclaiming that "I'm indier than thou" might get you some (utterly meaningless) clout with... well, I don't know who. The main thing is I find encouraging is there's a number of proven ways to run a sustainable software business. And that's nice to know, because if at some point I need to or want to change how I'm doing things, it isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario.
I've been working on this one for multiple years now, commitment and the art of Finishing Things is perhaps more important than any individual skill-set like programming. Obviously individual skill-sets are important, but you could be the greatest at everything and it's not worth very much if you're _also_ very good at giving up.. In my experience, the first 10% of working on a game is great fun because you're trying different things out, experimenting! And then you have to finish the thing - and getting a decent product to market is a hard slog whether it is a video game or not.
Simple advice to anyone interested in making games - make something small and simple in a single weekend, a snake clone or something, and then go from there.
I use Unity (currently 2019.3, probably moving to 2020 soon, for the new v2 of the Hybrid Renderer package) and C#. Photoshop for painting with an Wacom Intuos 5 tablet (Adobe Script for slicing and exporting), Spine for animating (highly recommended! Check out esotericsoftware.com), Modo for all my 3D needs. Git for version control, Gitlab for hosting, and lots of Python and Django for the web service parts of my current game, as well as my website. Lots of Google Sheets for marketing and accounting.
And, of course, paper and pens to doodle and make notes and keep track of where everything is at and what I'm working on next.
And yes, I'm on YouTube over here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVCz-_8VfkVwgB1WzCcuq4w
I see a fair amount of discussion about the "what is indie" angle here, but I most appreciated this article for pointing out various funding options that do not carry hyper-growth expectations. I suppose taking any money at all violates the rules of my previous paragraph, but it still seems closer in spirit than traditional VC. I don't know that I'll ever attempt to start a business again, but if I did, I would certainly look more into those options.