

Who is living off their (bootstrapped) startup fulltime? - jarcoal

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

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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.

~~~
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.

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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.

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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!

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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.)

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justinchen
My business partner and I have been running Menuism (<http://www.menuism.com>)
since 2006. It's bootstrapped and profitable. We also run The Wedding Lens
(<http://www.theweddinglens.com>) and PickFu (<http://pickfu.com>).

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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.

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fadys
I launched <http://teapeat.com> about 6 months ago.

Income from delivering monthly tea is slowly climbing every month.

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DaveChild
Not quite yet, but early days for my projects:

<http://www.addedbytes.com/projects/>

I'm working hard on the top three, and aiming to start making some real money
out of them by the end of summer.

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kayhi
Wow, it's been about a year:

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

Selling scientific research chemicals and supplies.

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Concours
I'm not yet fully leaving of it but, <http://www.feedsapi.com> is steadily
growing and generating some profit.

