Awesome Self Funded

An inspirational list of successful self-funded AKA "bootstrapped" software startups that never took any outside funding, but turn a profit instead.

Awesome products that have significant annual revenue of 7-figures or close, and where a paying customer is the only boss they have to please (not VC or the owning megacorp).

• Ahrefs - SEO software ($50M ARR)
• Balsamiq - UI mockup software ($7.3M ARR)
• Chili Piper - sales meeting scheduling automation ($3M ARR)
• CoderPad - interviewing programmers remotely ($4M ARR)
• DNSimple - domain management API ($2M ARR)
• EverHour - employee time tracking ($1.4M ARR)
• Floify - SaaS for mortgage businesses ($7M ARR)
• Fomo - marketing widget showing social proof ($1M ARR)
• Ghost - CMS/publishing platform for paid membership sites ($2.5M ARR)
• GMass - mass emailing from within GMail ($1.6M ARR)
• Grasshopper - virtual VoIP for entrepreneurs ($25M ARR)
• Gumroad - payment processing for creators ($5M ARR, funded but bought the equity back)
• Hubstaff - employee time tracking ($2.5M ARR)
• JetBrains - Developer tools ($270M ARR)
• Jitbit - Help desk app ($3M ARR)
• Jivo Chat - Live chat widget for websites ($7.5M ARR)
• Less Annoying Crm - SaaS CRM ($2.5M)
• LiveAgent- Help desk app ($4M ARR)
• MailChimp - Email marketing automation ($700M ARR)
• MailerLite - Email marketing automation ($10M ARR)
• Mangools - SEO toolbelt ($2.6M ARR)
• MyClean - Uber for cleaning ($9M AR)
• Park.io - Domain backorders for hackers ($1.5M AR)
• Postmark - transactional email service ($24M ARR)
• Scraper API - web-scraping proxy with API ($3.3M ARR)
• SendPulse - email + messenger marketing ($2.5M ARR)
• YouCanBookMe - meeting scheduling ($2M ARR)
• Zoho - Cloud/SaaS software suite ($500M ARR)

Sources: founder interviews, Indiehackers, podcasts, folks I know personally from conferences etc.

PS. While compiling this list I found many, many companies who used to be self-funded and very profitable, but eventually decided to raise a round. SurveyMonkey, GitHub, Braintree, Shopify, ConvertKit - all had tens of millions in revenue when eventually taking the VC road. Those companies are not listed here.

Contributing

Feel free to add your company. Contributing guidelines can be found in .github/CONTRIBUTING.md.