This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have over one million dollars in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Note: Mitchell Harper will be answering reader questions in the comments.

“I was building online stores for a few years and the off-the-shelf options were horrible,” explains Mitchell Harper, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of BigCommerce. “There were a lot of open source offerings, but they were basic and you needed a developer to customize the code for you. We wanted to build shopping cart software that was innovative and would give you an online store with most of the functionality of Amazon.com or Zappos.com for a few hundred bucks.”

That desire led to BigCommerce, which is now approaching 10,000 paying customers. According to Harper, the company has grown 480% over the last 4 years and is the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world. It was ranked the 14th fastest growing software company (#633 overall) on the Inc 5,000 list for 2010 and it now has 50 employees spread between its Sydney, Australia and Austin, Texas offices.

From chat room to company
Harper (right in photo below) and partner Eddie Machaalani (left) had each started a content management system already — Harper built SiteWorks, Machaalani created WebEdit — when they met in a programming chat room. They realized they were both in Sydney and eventually decided to join forces to build software together under the name Interspire.

When they launched the Interspire Shopping Cart, it attracted thousands of businesses. Customers weren’t completely satisfied with the installable software though. Harper says, “We had so many people telling us how awesome it was, but that they didn’t want to have to deal with finding their own servers, installing it, upgrading it, etc. So that’s where the idea for BigCommerce came from.” BigCommerce lets customers create customized online stores via the web. These retailers can then access orders, products, inventory, and more without ever having to download any software.

According to Harper, ease of use (e.g. embedding help tips and links to knowledge base articles in the app) is a big reason for the shopping cart software’s success. “We really had to focus on building simple user interfaces and keeping the complex stuff in the background,” he says.

Constant iterations have also helped. “We release major new features every 6-8 weeks and we’re working on getting that down to once a week. We look at BigCommerce as part of a larger pie that business owners need to compete. The other parts of the pie are order management software, accounting software, and analytics software. So making these integrations simple means BigCommerce can be used by hundreds of different types of businesses.”

Re: the new job openings at 37signals, seems like a good time to remind those who are interested of these creative “application-sites” that helped previous candidates land jobs with 37signals:

Jason Zimdars, Design

Craig Davey, Programming

Jason Rehmus, Support

Ann Goliak, Support

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Note: Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com will respond today (12/7) in the comments section to reader questions.

The liability of growth

“In 2007 we did $750,000 in revenue with five employees. In 2008 we did $12 million with twelve people,” says Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com, a site that helps consumers save money on their insurance.

But it was far from a dream, according to Kravitz. “Every time I mention explosive growth as a huge potential liability there are lots of confused looks,” he says. “How could the revenue exploding possibly be a bad thing? All of a sudden our little five person startup went from $750,000 in revenue to $12 million in 11 months. We had to hire like crazy, expand our development platform like crazy, expand our customer service, payment processing, banking, everything imaginable.

“We had never really had HR issues and now all of a sudden we had to deal with employee troubles, benefits programs, and revamping of hiring practices. Our phone systems couldn’t handle the volume of calls we were getting. Our servers couldn’t handle going from processing 500 leads a day to 11,000. Suddenly, it felt as if the company had grown a life of it’s own and we were simply along for the ride. Every day was spent playing catch-up that year and it probably shaved off 10 years of our lives with the stress. Like so many before us, it could have destroyed the company, but we luckily got through it.”

“Suddenly, it felt as if the company had grown a life of it’s own and we were simply along for the ride. Every day was spent playing catch-up.”

The company decided to actively hit the brakes on growth in order to examine all aspects of the business — from the way they hired, to training, to customer service, to the call center. Kravitz says, “We slowed our sales down to rebuild our entire platform, increase stability, and code some new features designed to increase revenue.” Now that process is done, the focus is back on growth again.

The partners meet

What drove Kravitz, a college student when the company was founded, to the unsexy world of insurance? “It’s certainly not the flashiest profession in the world, but it is a very useful one,” according to Kravitz. “Our concept was to build a service where anyone in the US can hop on our site and start comparing rates from up to five local insurance agents.” The site then generates revenue by helping agents find new customers.

Kravitz and Lev Barinskiy, his business partner, originally met at a party on the Ohio State campus their freshman year. Kravitz says, “To be honest, we really didn’t like each other as far as first impressions go. We were both straight out of high school. Really just a couple of kids at that point and we acted like it.”

About two years later, they met again through a mutual friend. “Once we sat down and really got to know each other, everything changed,” says Kravitz. By this point, he had started a small web design company and Barinskiy had started a successful insurance agency. Barinskiy mentioned that he wanted to start building insurance websites and needed a partner to get it going.

InsuranceAgents.com co-founders Seth Kravitz (left) and Lev Barinskiy. (Photo: Jonathan Robert Willis for Inc.)

A shoestring operation

Within a week, they were working together out of Barinskiy’s parents’ basement on a couple of plastic folding tables from Home Depot. “We ran an ethernet cable out of his bedroom window down the outside of the house into the basement to get online down there,” explains Kravitz. “He owned a food cart business serving Ohio State football games, so in his basement he had stacks of candy and chips. That means lunch most days consisted of standing up, walking to the corner, grabbing a Kit-Kat and walking back to the desk.”

“We ran an ethernet cable out of the bedroom window down the outside of the house into the basement to get online.”

Verifiable (shut down August 1, 2010)
Stuart Roseman shut down Verifiable, a crowdsourced charting and data analysis site, to start SaneBox, a product that automatically identifies important email and separates them in a user’s inbox. Below, he explains how he knew when it was time to pull the plug on Verifiable.

“We couldn’t charge for it. It was pretty clear. I’ve done this for a long time. I said, ‘This is a bad idea. I need a new idea.’

“The Verifiable problem still exists. It hasn’t been solved. There’s still chart junk. It’s got to be easier. But Verifiable was something I thought the world needed. SaneBox was something the world was asking for.

“My new mantra is: ‘I will make a product that people want to pay for and that they will be happy to pay for.’ I wake up in the morning and I say that. And I go to sleep at night and say that. It really changes everything.”

Related: “Out with the old business, in with the new”

Wesabe (shut down June 30, 2010)
Wesabe launched as a site to help people manage their personal finances. While competitor Mint was acquired by Intuit, Wesabe eventually shut down. In “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint,” Marc Hedlund dissects what happened.

“Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that…I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.

“You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.”

Related: “Wesabe is discontinuing its Accounts tab as of July 31st”

Storytlr (shut down February 24, 2009)
Storytlr let members create their own lifestreaming service (i.e. connecting Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and other accounts) at their own URL. Founder Laurent Eschenauer on what happened:

“Storytlr started as a personal project to power my own site. People liked it, so we decided to build a nice UI and start hosting it for others. We were developing and operating the service next to our day job and families. We were quickly successfull, reaching beyond 10,000 users quickly and this meant a lot of strains on our lives (maintenance, support, etc.) and budget (~500$ monthly hosting bill) without any revenues.

“At that point, we started researching potential revenue models and investors, but quickly realized that the service was not well suited for a strong revenue stream. It was a tough choice, but, for the security of our families, we decided to pull the plug.”

Related: Laurent Eschenauer pitches Storytlr to Google’s Sergey Brin

TwitApps (shut down September 13, 2009)
Stuart Dallas created TwitApps as a technical exercise for himself. But after some early blog coverage, it attracted 4000 active users (and that number was growing). Despite that base, he couldn’t turn it into a product that was worth the effort.

“I considered the whole thing to be a toy project for a long time and it took me a while to realize that people were starting to rely on the service.

“Once you’ve established a free service and that service has other free competition, it’s very difficult to monetize it. It’s also very hard to change people’s impression of what something is once they’ve decided for themselves.”

“It became difficult to juggle the time demands of supporting TwitApps with the requirements of a full time job, several contracts and the need for downtime. In the end something had to go and it was clearly going to be the bit that wasn’t earning any money.”

Related: “TwitApps shutting down”