HN Explorer

Who is living off their (bootstrapped) startup fulltime?

56 points by jarcoal ↗ HN
This is a spiritual successor to this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924909. However, I am hoping to just hear from bootstrappers today.

Show us what is paying your bills. Inspiration for those that are not there yet.

21 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] thread
RudySF
Launched a vertical ad network a few years ago with 2 friends.

Took no salary for 6 months, then a small salary to pay the bills for the next 9 months.

Then... business started to grow to yearly low seven figures in revenue and we're now paying ourselves a reasonable salary, contributing to retirement, and building up our company's cash reserves for future investments.

jarcoal
Congrats! Feel free to link to it if you'd like.
joshkaufman
I started Personal MBA (http://personalmba.com) a few years ago as a side project. It's now a six-figure publishing business that's growing rapidly. Offers include trade published books, self-published books, online courses, live training, and consulting. (Recently, I've been moving to less consulting and more products.) I quit my job at a big corporation a few years ago to work on the business full-time.

I don't have employees, have very low overhead, have zero consumer/business debt, and we're in the process of building a house. I choose new projects primarily based on what I find most interesting, and I have no need to chase financing to grow.

My wife also runs a bootstrapped six-figure publishing business in a different market. That business was built in a lot less time, and she was able to recoup production expenses for three high-priced professional training courses that sell very well to an addressable market.

We also spend a lot of time with our daughter, which is why we both chose to build bootstrapped businesses.

Building a great bootstrapped business is definitely possible. Keep at it.

lupatus
How did you go about finding a printer and distributors?

Btw, love the book.

joshkaufman
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

For book projects, I work with a trade publisher or publish myself, depending on the project.

If a trade publisher handles the project, they take care of printing and distribution. (One of the major benefits of trade publishers is that they'll get you shelf space / promotion at major retailers.) I generally work with trade publishers if I think the book has mass market appeal that would benefit from broad distribution. (The threshold is 20k+ copies.)

If I'm self-publishing, I use Lightning Source (http://lightningsource.com/). They're print-on-demand, and owned by Ingram, so you get instant distribution on Amazon and bookstore websites. Most bookstores will also list your title as "available for order" if a customer requests a copy by name. 48hrbooks.com is great for one-off workbook or other specialty orders that don't need retail distribution.

If I'm self-publishing electronically, I use my own delivery system and/or Amazon Kindle Direct publishing. Lots of control if you do it yourself, and/or hire specialized contractors.

Hope this helps!

lupatus
Thanks for the insight, Josh!
maguay
And I can personally say (as someone who received a review copy ... thanks Josh!) that the Personal MBA book is great. My teenage siblings even found it interesting enough that they have told me things they learned from it. It's seriously great.
dangrossman
I started my business in earnest freshman year of college, 2003/2004, with virtually no money. I developed a handful of SaaS webapps with a couple tens of thousands of users I support on my own. It's a lifestyle business, with no employees and no grand ambitions... just enough work for a comfortable schedule and good enough pay that I'd never trade it in for regular employment.

http://www.dangrossman.info/category/portfolio/

jiggy2011
You look like you have been very productive. Multiple simple apps, I like the business model.

How did you go about getting your first 1000 users when as you say , you had almost no money to spend?

dangrossman
Participating thoughtfully in 'webmaster forums', primarily. I made over 20,000 posts at SitePoint alone. Each site I made was promoted on the previous ones... I still heavily cross-promote as there's overlap in the market for most things I build.

I don't spend much time in forums anymore. The people that were part of my communities have moved on to newer ones, while young Indians seem to have taken over much of the old ones, creating a very different atmosphere.

dreamdu5t
Amazing. Do you think a contributing factor of your success was the total control as the sole decision maker?
strelok
Ahhh ... you're the guy that started Visitor Boost :) Worthless pop-under traffic :) This must be a real money spinner though. Lots of resellers.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
dangrossman
It's just an affiliate site for another company, basically, that I set up in a few days years ago. Nobody resells it AFAIK. Most of my revenue's from W3Counter and W3ROI.
fadys
I launched http://teapeat.com about 6 months ago.

Income from delivering monthly tea is slowly climbing every month.

HerraBRE
I am living (frugally) off http://pagekite.net/ at the moment.

TBH I am not sure it counts as we managed to secure a government grant for building our initial product. We've got a year left of "runway" before we need to either become cash-flow positive or bite the bullet and seek outside investment.

As I said, I realize this may not really count as bootstrapping, but I mention it as I think it may be an interesting (and oft overlooked) way to fund the early stages of a tech start-up, at least in places where local governments have programs in place to encourage economic development.

(For those who don't know what PageKite is, its main use is as a tool for web developers to demo and test sites on localhost against the public Internet - but we have ambitions to grow and become an alternative to traditional hosting and help make desktop apps and embedded devices integrate better with the web.)