Highly successful Bootstrapped startups

One of the myths that you see so often in the entrepreneurship and business space is that you need help and aggressive funding to really succeed. While most Silicon Valley startups receive tons of angel and VC investment, their failure rates are still quite high.

If these funded super successful startups with aggressive growth and the backing of millions and strong networks cannot succeed, how can a bootstrapped entrepreneur hope to compete? Easy. You are fighting a completely different beast. Rather than going to battle with a massive army of highly equipped warriors trained for battle to face dastardly dragon for the ultimate supremacy, bootstrapped startups grab the spoon and go out to try and kill and cook the goose.

Traditionally bootstrapped businesses take on slightly smaller problems or issues and work to truly build strong business value and foundation, rather than merely acquiring myriads of users. Some bootstrapped businesses however grow over time and build such an amazing product, service or experience that the company’s strategy of steady and sustainable profit driven growth builds the company to a truly prolific and powerful position. Here are some of the greatest examples in today’s world of absurdly successful unfunded companies and their stories of greatness. Each one has very valuable experiences and strategies you can employ today in your own startup to work and boost your odds of success and trajectory of the business, be it software or physical products.

1) MailChimp

For those of you who do not know, MailChimp is the highly popular email marketing provider used by a great deal of businesses today to manage customer mailing campaigns. Formed in 2001 when it was still called ChimpMail, MailChimp was a completely subscription based service with no free trials or support. Instead of taking the typical startup approach of building a free product with a limited feature set and trying to upsell their audience to a paid approach, their founders opted to create a really robust marketing platform right in the middle of the dotcom collapse.

During the more than 13 years since launch MailChimp has continued to innovate and play around with their pricing schemes. This allowed the company to have really prolific growth before launching their freemium version in 2009 when they had only 85, o00 users. Since then the company has truly skyrocketed. In the year following the launch of the freemium version MailChimp added 30, 000 new users every month with about 4, 000 of those being paid. The profit of the business increased by over 650% as the marketing cost to acquire a new user decreased and since 2010 MailChimp has furthered upon these successes to build a truly spectacular company with an estimated quarter of a billion dollars in annual revenue this year.