Awesome Self Funded
An inspirational list of successful self-funded AKA "bootstrapped" software startups that never took any outside funding, but turn a profit instead.
Awesome products that have significant annual revenue of 7-figures or close, and where a paying customer is the only boss they have to please (not VC or the owning megacorp).
- Ahrefs - SEO software ($50M ARR)
- Balsamiq - UI mockup software ($7.3M ARR)
- Chili Piper - sales meeting scheduling automation ($3M ARR)
- CoderPad - interviewing programmers remotely ($4M ARR)
- DNSimple - domain management API ($2M ARR)
- EverHour - employee time tracking ($1.4M ARR)
- Floify - SaaS for mortgage businesses ($7M ARR)
- Fomo - marketing widget showing social proof ($1M ARR)
- GMass - mass emailing from within GMail ($1.6M ARR)
- Grasshopper - virtual VoIP for entrepreneurs ($25M ARR)
- Gumroad - payment processing for creators ($5M ARR, funded but bought the equity back)
- Hubstaff - employee time tracking ($2.5M ARR)
- JetBrains - Developer tools ($270M ARR)
- Jitbit - Help desk app ($3M ARR)
- Jivo Chat - Live chat widget for websites ($7.5M ARR)
- Less Annoying Crm - SaaS CRM ($2.5M)
- LiveAgent- Help desk app ($4M ARR)
- MailChimp - Email marketing automation ($700M ARR)
- MailerLite - Email marketing automation ($10M ARR)
- Mangools - SEO toolbelt ($2.6M ARR)
- MyClean - Uber for cleaning ($9M AR)
- Park.io - Domain backorders for hackers ($1.5M AR)
- Postmark - transactional email service ($24M ARR)
- SendPulse - email + messenger marketing ($2.5M ARR)
- YouCanBookMe - meeting scheduling ($2M ARR)
- Zoho - Cloud/SaaS software suite ($500M ARR)
Sources: founder interviews, Indiehackers, podcasts, folks I know personally from conferences etc.
PS. While compiling this list I found many, many companies who used to be self-funded and very profitable, but eventually decided to raise a round. SurveyMonkey, GitHub, Braintree, Shopify, ConvertKit - all had tens of millions in revenue when eventually taking the VC road.
Contributing
Feel free to add your company. Contributing guidelines can be found in .github/CONTRIBUTING.md.