[USNetizen]

Having done the same thing myself (bootstrapped a services company from $0 to over $8M/year in revenue in 5 years and grown a SaaS product from $0 to ~$800k ARR in 16 months completely bootstrapped), you can go into debt for a short time while bootstrapping, but generally not 3.5+ years unless you are independently wealthy or have a retirement nest egg you've been saving for a few decades you're prepared to liquidate.

At some point your access to capital dries up when banks see your level of risk increase. You might be able to survive moderate losses for a year or two and cover it with personal debt financing, depending on how much money and access to capital you have personally, but 3.5 to 4 years covering losses with personal debt is REALLY pushing it. You're most likely talking several hundred thousand dollars at that point even for a small startup.

And $1M ARR is only enough to support a team of 9 if the average salary being paid is around $50k-$55k/year (or if 2 or more people aren't even drawing a salary). Which makes sense because, in their blog, they describe hiring someone for marketing that was much less "senior" - i.e. cheaper - and not being happy with it. Taxes, fees, registrations, legal/accounting, benefits (if any), insurance, hosting, technical infrastructure, etc. can easily eat up over $300k/yr for a team of 9 - not including direct payroll.

[tiffanyh]

Re: $8m/year in 5 years time.

That’s an amazing accomplishment.

Would you mind sharing,

- how many employees you have

- biggest driver to your revenue success

- biggest mistake the company made

- anything else you might find of interest to share

[USNetizen]

42 employees, or thereabouts. Biggest driver of revenue was focusing on an industry that buys everything in bulk - services, software, you name it. The federal government. It took two years of laying groundwork to get our first few contracts then took off from there. Biggest mistake we made was twofold - one, hiring too early in the beginning (we used a small amount of debt initially paying salaries for "overhead" people, like marketing, sales, consultants, etc., that simply didn't work out or were far too inexperienced) and, two, giving a substantial amount of equity to someone who was intended to be a cofounder type but was a paid employee, didn't put any money into the business (but took plenty out), and didn't have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Key lesson: choose your partner(s) and employees wisely.