Hi, I'm wondering if you guys know of any lists where businesses disclose revenue? Specifically looking for startup/software type businesses, but any business type will do and I don't mind sifting through large lists. My intent is to study high growth bootstrapped and profitable software businesses, but I want to start with actual financials as a filter.
My hypothesis is that bootstrapped and profitable startups exploit market inefficiencies which have a lower barrier to entry and need less critical mass of functionality than VC backed companies, although the opportunity may be narrower and total addressable market may be much smaller.
Obviously IH has a small section, and there is the Inc5000 list https://www.inc.com/inc5000/list/2019. which discloses revenue only, as well as https://postmake.io/open and https://baremetrics.com/open-startups and failory. I believe mixergy.com may disclose some revenue numbers as well.
Any other lists or resources worth looking into?
Thanks.
Mr Latka has also a lot of data, he also has a Magazine:
https://www.getlatka.com/
and he is a super fan of bootstrapped startups.
Regarding your hypothesis, I don't agree with them.
I think there is plenty of opportunities in the SaaS space, with lower values of entry, and the only difference between VC backed and bootstrapped startups is that bootstrapped startups owners are making more money than VC backed startups owners and keeping most of the ownership. That's the only difference.
Mailchimp is bootstrapped, doing 700M in 2019.
Clickfunnel is bootstrapped, I think it's doing around 200M
Basecamp doing around 25M
The three are in huge markets and have huge opportunities.
I had to manually compile Postmake's Open Startups list, and I don't recall seeing any list of the sort while searching.
I think your best bet is to manually sift through the multitude of interviews, blog posts, and podcast appearances on websites like Indie Hackers and Failory. Most of these tend to quickly get outdated, but at least you get to see a snapshot of the business and its relative standing at the time.
The lists you have are a great starting point too!