

Your (bootstrapped/lean/side project) startup was profitable from day one? - spIrr

I would love to read about startups which were profitable from day one and gained a lot of traction! Please share your story.
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patio11
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com>

I wrote it in eight days with a budget of $60, and recouped that within three
sales. It has been profitable since. I don't know if you would call it a lot
of traction -- by Twitter accounting I have something like two hundred
thousand users. Anyhow, 4 years and 3,500 odd paying customers later, it was
paying my full-time salary, and I quit the day job. That was about 7 months
ago. BCC (and consulting) gave me enough time, money, and smarts to get my
next project ready.

<http://www.appointmentreminder.org>

That launches in 48 hours. Depending on one's optimism in counting promised
orders prior to the cash physically being in one's hand, it is already
profitable.

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spIrr
Wish you luck with appointmentremider and i hope to hear about in the level of
detail you give us about bingocardcreator all the time! Very nice, you are
probably the most motivating person for me on HN! :)

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forcer
In 2007 after few failed attempts with my crazy startup ideas I read lots of
articles about how Google Arbitrage is dead. This inspired me to actually
tried it out and I got profitable from day 1. This success led me to focus
solely on marketing PPC-affiliate arbitrage and eventually building sites and
domains. Now 3 years later after lots of hard work I have successful business
with over $1 million in revenues that is well diversified across portfolio of
sites and software products.

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zdw
I'd narrow the question - there's a difference between being profitable and
having revenue.

1\. Some companies have the revenue from day one, but never reach
profitability

2\. Some don't have revenue at day one but are profitable.

For example, most consulting businesses, when started by people who already
have the chops for what they're doing and have clients lined up, tends to be
like #1.

A company that needs to scale up it's online presence to be effective (for
example, something that works on user network effect like
ebay/craigslist/etc.) may not take in money during the product development
phase, tend be be like #2.

You can also be a hybrid, like 37 signals that went from consulting and design
for others to selling their own apps. I tend to think that this is one of the
better methods of bootstrapping - you get exposure to customers and business
methods, and can see where needs are, then target them, all the while taking
in revenue.

The downside is that bootstrap method is that your consulting could cause
contention for time/resources - you have to want to do both and be good at
balancing them. If this is an issue, it may make sense to look for investors
to put in capital to cover the dev phase.

~~~
Jabbles
I disagree, I think the definition of profitable requires a company to have
(had) revenue.

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technoweenie
When people say their bootstrapped business was profitable from day one,
they're usually not getting paid any kind of salary from it.

When I started Lighthouse, we were "profitable" right away because of a few
strategic deals. Our only monthly bill was to our CC gateway. At the time, my
partner and I were both consulting to make ends meet. Essentially, we were
working our asses off on two jobs and only getting one real paycheck out of
it. I think it was about a year before Lighthouse could sustain us both.

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kayhi
<http://store.p212121.com/>

An e-commerce site, I talked with a number of customers before launching (wish
I had something more fascinating for you). The site fits under the category of
scratching my own itch since I am a scientist. I wouldn't consider the site as
having lots of traction nor expected it knowing the customer base. At the
moment am focused on customer's problems and am quite dependent on word of
mouth.

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lachyg
Not really a startup (and has changed quite a bit since selling it), but my
site <http://iPadCaseFinder.com/> (Used to be a case finding resource, which
aff linked to Amazon) was profitable from day one.

Bought a template of ThemeForest, customised it, and created a filtering
plugin, then launched it. Received 50,000 uniques in the first week through
blog posts. Earned around $6000 from it in 3 months.

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jswinghammer
Mine was but we lined up customers before really building our product.
Customers are coming to us now after our initial customers have been singing
our praises. Our customers love us so far and want to see us succeed. That
part is awesome. I have no idea where it will go but I feel like if we delight
our customers we'll do fine.

