<story><title>How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR</title><url>https://www.scrapingbee.com/journey-to-one-million-arr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>Congratulations! But maybe &amp;quot;bootstrapped&amp;quot; is not a 100% correct.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daolf</author><text>This blew way out of proportion.&lt;p&gt;Misleading people was never the intent.&lt;p&gt;We just wanted to share our story and give a little more &amp;quot;human&amp;quot; touch to our about-us page by sharing the journey.&lt;p&gt;Title was amended.&lt;p&gt;Have a good week-end HN!</text></comment>
<story><title>How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR</title><url>https://www.scrapingbee.com/journey-to-one-million-arr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>Congratulations! But maybe &amp;quot;bootstrapped&amp;quot; is not a 100% correct.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dreig</author><text>Looking at their MRR growth, it seems that they had ~$5K MRR in Spring of 2020, at the time they joined TinySeed.
So perhaps a more technically accurate post would be: &amp;quot;How we bootstrapped to $60K ARR, then took a small investment and grew the company to $1MM ARR&amp;quot; ?&lt;p&gt;When, in the lifecycle of the company, can you sell a small stake of it and still call it bootstrapped? Basecamp sold a bit of equity in 2006 to Bezos[1], and is still considered the epitome of the bootstrapped company.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if one has a couple hundred K after working at MANGA or wherever, or has wealthy parents&amp;#x2F;friends and uses that money to build their own start-up, is that still bootstrapping?&lt;p&gt;To me, their journey is much closer to bootstrapping, and is quite an impressive achievement. Congrats, guys!&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&amp;#x2F;the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-basecamp&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&amp;#x2F;the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-baseca...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>