How long did it take you to get your business to sustain yourself and you could switch doing it fulltime?
Slowly working towards starting my own bootstraped business and I'm looking for others experience. Of the top of my head I would guess it would take me about two years, if ever.
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With Transistor.fm, the timeline looked like this:
However, like most things, your journey will depend on a number of factors.
That's an interesting timeline, amazing growth from 04-07.19.
The first one (four years) was instant since we were funded. So that's obviously nice, but it puts you in a tough spot when it goes out of business.
Another three (two years) never supported me, so I subsidized them with freelancing. Fortunately, they died rather quickly.
Then I started picking ideas intentionally based on their ability to quickly pay the bills, and it worked a lot better. A coworking space started paying for my life within 30 days (which was fortunate since I didn't have enough money to pay next month's rent). An education agency secured 50k in work before we committed to actually start it. A publishing business began as a hobby and I only started spending serious time on it once it was already paying for my whole life.
Overall it's been 12 years now. I'd say that it took me 6 years to figure out how to pick and build ideas which could reliably pay the bills, and the 6 years since have been relatively "easy".
(I'm fudging the order of events a bit to simplify the narrative, but it's true in spirit if not in exact details.)
That's amazing. What a great story! It's totally possible to run/grow more than one business, but folks just need to set the expectation that it will likely take a long time.
For FeedbackPanda, it took us a month for the product to pay for itself (hosting, services). That was around July 2017. I paid myself for the first time in April 2018. Both I and my co-founder Danielle went full-time from there.
We had explosive initial growth due to word-of-mouth in a small community. That allowed for the product to be self-sustaining quickly, and then it was just a question of re-investing the profits to grow the company.
All in all, it took us around 9 months.
We started in March 2017, and by August 2017 we were making enough to wing it. Because we still had commitments, it wasn't until October 2017 that we actually both quit and went full-time.
By early 2018, both of us (Anya and I, co-founders) were making more from our company than we had made at our 9-to-5s combined.
For my first startup (now defunct), it took me about 4 months to go from $0 to $1.5k MRR. This was back in Asia and 2011 though. I went full-time from the start while living at home with my parents.
That's an amazing growth rate. What happened to it?
It stagnated after a while, and I decided to pursue other things (unrelated to startups/programming). Then I had to go to prison for 4 months, which really hammered in the final nail in the coffin. I came out to a full support inbox and also cancellation emails. I decided to shelve it.
Thanks for the story. Sounds like an unfortunate chain of events. Best of luck with your new venture 🙌
For me, it took more than 5 years. But it's a really old story :)
It can take a really long time, but at least you stuck it out!
It took me a long time. One year after launch (so even more than a year from when we started the company) we were at $500 MRR. A year later we were at $5,000.
Around that time we could afford to pay one person a modest salary, and we faced a tough decision: should one of the two founders quit their day job (I'd been working ~20 hours/week and my co-founder worked a full-time job)? What we decided is that it would be even more impactful to hire someone to help with support while we continued focusing on product and growth. So oddly enough, neither of the founders were the first full-time person at the company.
Another year and a half after hiring the support person (so 3.5 years total into the company) my co-founder and I both switched to full-time.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to keep working on something that isn't going anywhere, but patience is a super power. As long as things are trending in the right direction, the more time you can give yourself to make it work, the more likely you are to succeed. This is one reason why I love bootstrapping: infinite runway!
I love these stories thank you so much for sharing. I agree completely on the bootstraping. Taking funding just puts you under so much pressure and takes the fun away and ultimately you are not really your own boss anymore, which defeats the purpose.
About 2 yr 3 months
With Adreform.com and Userfeed.io, we went full-time from day one. We didn’t pay ourselves for 18 months. This was hard, for obvious reasons and we probably should have started earlier.
We’re currently upwards of $250k ARR. We talk about our story here: https://listen.madewithgrit.fm/episodes/1-hello-world-also-we-hit-a-revenue-milestone
18month without any income is not an option for me. Gonna check out that podcast, thanks
Totally empathetic to that. Everyone's situation is different. I had saved up a good bit for years knowing this could be a possibility and my wife works as well. We just wanted to let the audience know what kind of sacrifices/decisions you might have to make before and during going full-time on a bootstrapped startup. It's not glamorous in the beginning by any means ;)
the podcast was interesting ;)
Ha. What do you mean? Do you have any specific feedback?
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How was process with Earnest Capital?
Very interesting, thank you for sharing.
I'd like to avoid having to take funding. Definitely not going to wait until I reach my current salary.
Jesus Christ. What a journey.
How did you get fired?
And was it difficult selling your house?
You really sacrificed a lot to make your startup happen.