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!
> 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!
Errm I think me and my mates count as bootstrappers. Never heard the term before but we have paid off the mortgage on our premises and are decidedly boring.
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)
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.
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.
Congrats! Being able to run a nice company bootstrapped seems amazing.
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.
I've been using Dato for years for private projects (would love a Hobby tier ;) ) and have been impressed with it from the start.
Hearing that Dato and the people behind it are thriving makes me very happy!
A success that's well deserved! :-D
Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.
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.
>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
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.
Congratulations on the success - you’re rightly proud, and that amount of cashflow brings real stability to owners and employees.
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!
> 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.
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.
We've been using Dato for 5 years or so - a bit of a weird use case probably, we're driving configuration of our internal EHR with it. But it is very nice for creating a structured set of data models and then you've got a nice UI to input the data and a nice API for grabbing the data, all of which the engineering team didn't need to build.
Very cool on on the business model details! I love this model of doing it for multiple reasons.
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?
it's not hard to make something without funding, even by yourself, as long as you have the time and skill. but problem of the internet of today is saturation. you can have the best service or tool, much better than the number one on the market, but if you have no cash to burn on ads, you won't get anywhere.
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).
---
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.
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!
It's Europe; salaries suck across the board. That's the market, so there are no competing offers. Then again it's incredibly hard to fire people. Maybe they should start a union after all.
What are you even referring to?
Salaries in many European countries are perfectly fine when compared to the costs of living etc.
Inflated salaries with inflated prices for everything else aren‘t just better because the number is higher ^^
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%.
> We spent the winter prototyping (experimenting with everything from bare metal to alternative PaaS providers — some of which shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty
mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?
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 have recently realised bootstrapping is interesting way to build business. More so now with advent agentic stuff. Hear me out.
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.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] threadOur 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!
Have an internet fist-bump from a fellow successful bootstrapper; this is the way, and you're calling it out!
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)
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.
Turning 10, you might want to stop ditching WordPress for being 15 on your homepage though ;)
After all, you'll be there in only 5 years!https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp
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.
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.
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!
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.
It's been rock solid for us.
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?
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).
---
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.
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.
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?
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?
https://www.datocms.com/company/profit-sharing
mind at least naming what to look out for when evaluating PaaSes?
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.