| CarGurus: This app leverages data analytics to help customers find the best deal on used cars, but the company’s CEO credits its $50 million a year in revenue, and profitability, to hiring a sales team early in the company’s life cycle. Nearly half the company’s 350 employees are busy making sales calls, not writing software. LootCrate: LootCrate had more than 600,000 customers and $100 million in revenue before they raised institutional capital. Part of the reason they were so efficient was that the company started charging customers from its first weekend in existence. The founders were at a hackathon, set up a landing page, collected orders and used that capital to buy the geeky goods that would fill the packages joyetech cuboid 150w. Be miserly with marketing Startup marketers might not want to waste time with unmeasurable brand marketing. Efficient entrepreneurs need campaigns to be additive, immediately. Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. This model kicked off a decade of profitable growth until they ultimately raised a Series A — worth $165 million — shortly before going public and earning a market cap that is currently over $4 billion. If you can’t creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? Cards Against Humanity: With just $15,700 in funding from Kickstarter, the Cards Against Humanity team built a business that grossed more than $12 million in its first year. They’ve also sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, digging a big hole representing the ennui of a post-Trump America, then selling Trump “bug out” bags and simply asking for money. These promotions aren’t cheap to run, but they make enough money to defray costs while earning a disproportionate amount of free media. GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a business model. Paired with hyper-efficient conversion rate optimization (CRO), it can be unbeatable. The founders of GoFundMe were able to use these twin forces to bootstrap a business to the point where it was valued at ~$600 million. Efficiency > Capital Startups are often measured by how much money they’ve raised. It’s more important to ask how efficiently those companies use the capital. Efficiency doesn’t mean penny-pinching, but instead, finding entrepreneurs who orient their business around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital. PaintNite: The idea of combining Monet and Merlot has been around for a while, but the founders of PaintNite wanted to make the model more cost-effective. While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital Unified Threat Management. Plenty of Fish: The dating site was founded in 2003 and didn’t change dramatically regarding functionality or aesthetics over the next decade. Other sites had more features, flashier graphics and copious amounts of venture funding, but PoF was free and spent most of its resources fighting spam accounts. As with Craigslist, Plenty of Fish’s biggest asset was its reputation as a well-stocked pond. The company iterated on the product over time, but never needed massive infusions of capital. Ultimately, the company sold for $575 million. Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. The Swedish studio never got sucked into fads like Zynga-inspired social spamming and predatory microtransactions. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion acquisition. Fortune favors the “boring” Boring isn’t a value judgment. Many of the most impressive, successful companies that managed to grow without capital thrived by solving acute, if somewhat dry, problems. If you solve a hard problem, customers will happily fund it. SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s and though it wasn’t as disruptive as peers like Kosmo, it was more durable. It survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started. Protolabs does for plastic injection molding what Vistaprint does for business cards, and is currently worth $1.2 billion. Cvent, worth $1.3 billion, builds event management tools and Textura, acquired for $663 million, handles construction management — neither typically considered a hot or hip market. Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers and more than $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix. Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in 1979; the Wisconsin-based electronic medical records provider may be the largest bootstrapped software company operating today. eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 when the mantra was “get big fast,” and many of its contemporaries crashed and burned. By focusing on excelling at the dull, yet profitable work of managing clinical data, the company survived and now employs more than 4,000 workers and generates $320 million in annual revenue. Unity became a backbone of the mobile gaming industry by focusing on all of the unsexy aspects of game development, like cross-platform compatibility and “bump mapping.” They went years without raising capital, but now have a valuation over $1.5 billion, and are more successful than the majority of branded game startups tourism website. GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital. Qualtrics started as a tool to administer surveys for schools and businesses in a basement in Utah and now employs 1,000 and rakes in $100 million a year, profitably. Blessed are the unfundable
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