Why did we decide to go our way as a bootstrapped company?
Before we offered our service with Dotbite, we started as a startup with our platform timebite, focussed on changing how students get to relevant exam data.
We had ambitious growth plans, took every opportunity we had as 4 young founders and tried to accomplish as much as we can with limited budgets.
Soon, we recognized that things started working out. Our lifestyle standards as students were quite low back then, so we didn’t really need that much to survive (but we had some student jobs besides studies, so life was good). In the meantime we started generating revenues with timebite and had a cashflow.
All of this cashflow was reinvested, every penny went into product and sales. We grew.
And then, one day, we talked about further plans. About how we want to grow this company and team. What our dreams are.
Within minutes, we decided that we want to go on without any investor money. We wanted to do it completely by ourselves. Quite naive, but we were convinced.
The reason was, we wanted to stay flexible in our daily business, we didn’t want to be forced to inform someone regularly about our plans or why we did things the way we did them. Our plan was just to do the things we wanted to do, try things out and learn from our mistakes.
We wanted to stay small, but growing. We wanted to be free from the pressure of needing to make money, having investors on our backs every day asking what we are doing. We didn’t want to have any external influence on how we run our company.
Fast forward, today with over 20 amazing people in our team, we are more than happy that we had the courage to fight through the journey of bootstrapping our company.
We are proud, that we were humble and patient enough to wait until everything works out, we just couldn’t give up. As mentioned, it was naive and very risky, but it worked out for us.
It is still a crazy ride, but absolutely worth it.
