David Mayer, a product line manager at a Silicon Valley company and creator of The Clean Bottle, just listened to the audiobook version of REWORK and wrote us the following note.

37signals Team – I just listened to your audio book – twice! It was affirming to me because a lot of your recommendations are things I am already doing or have done…

I am a product line manager in Silicon Valley. I’m also an avid cyclist and I’ve always had problems cleaning out my water bottles. If I’d leave them with a bit of energy drink for a day or two, when I’d come back they’d look like a petri dish and I’d have to chuck them. So, three years ago I started working on a sports bottle that unscrews at both ends so I could actually clean and dry the dang thing. So – it was great to hear your advice about ‘scratching your own itch’.

I kept my day job the whole way through, going part time instead of quitting, so it was definitely cool to hear that that footed with your advice as well. I didn’t take any outside money – another piece of your advice – since I wanted total control of the company.

It took me three years, but in May I finally launched my company, Clean Bottle.

I didn’t have the budget for a big PR launch. So, I had to get creative – just like you guys suggested. One of the things I did was that I made a costume that looked like a giant Clean Bottle and went to France. I ran up the tops of the climbs alongside the riders at the Tour de France and got some SERIOUS air time and props. So much so that in the 3 weeks during the tour we sold close to $200K in product, most of it from our website, which is extremely high margin. Check out some of the footage here.

I really like your advice about using your byproduct. I am active on Facebook and Twitter and in my blogging. And we are making 5 Clean Bottle costumes and then giving them out to people who want to dress up as the costume…It definitely makes us the “anti-camelbak / specialized / nalgene” (another piece of your advice) since we are highlighting that we are the little guy and that we like to have fun instead of being serious all the time…

Anyways, thanks again for the book and the tips. We are doing well – in about 500 stores including all the REIs – and hope to keep growing, but only if we can do it without raising money and in a sustainable fashion.

Neat idea — thanks for the note David.

If you have a similar story about being influenced by REWORK, let us know by emailing rework [at] 37signals [dot] com.

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles profitable companies with over $1 million in revenues that never took VC.

“Our outfit Envato was started by myself, my big brother, my wife and my best friend,” says Collis Ta’eed (pictured below on the cover of Nett magazine). “We put in a bit of money we each had and mostly just worked hard.” In this Q&A, Ta’eed answers questions about Envato and its path to success. He will also be answering reader questions today (Oct 7) in the comment thread so feel free to ask a question!

What does your company do?
We do two main things: First we run sites that help people earn an income. These are our biggest sites in revenue and include ThemeForest which is the largest marketplace for buying and selling website templates and WordPress themes. In the early days selling with us would just be a sort of hobby income. Then after a while there were a few people who actually could manage to earn a living. These days there are guys earning, quite literally, tens of thousands of dollars a month. These sites are called the Envato Marketplaces, and there are 7 of them, with an eighth launching three days from the time I am writing this :-)

The second part of what we do is a set of sites to help people learn professional creative skills. These are our biggest sites in traffic and include Psdtuts+ which is the largest Photoshop tutorial site online. We also have tutorials published on a variety of other subjects including audio production, motion graphics, illustration, photography, mobile development and web development. The full network is called Tuts+ and there are nine sites with a tenth launching in a couple of months.

So learning and earning is what we do chiefly.

But we also operate a few other sites and services including Creattica which is one of the biggest design galleries online, FreelanceSwitch which is the biggest and oldest blog dedicated to freelancing, and AppStorm which is a very rapidly growing set of app review blogs that includes Mac.AppStorm, the largest blog dedicated to Mac Apps.

So basically, we do a lot of stuff :-) As you might imagine it’s difficult explaining to someone at a dinner party who casually asks what we do for a living.

How did the business get started?
Back in 2006, our plans were much more modest. We actually just wanted to build a marketplace for buying and selling Adobe Flash. At that time I used to sell my files on iStockPhoto, but as you would assume from the name, they didn’t give a lot of attention to Flash guys.

So we planned out a marketplace called FlashDen, and I put up a job ad for a PHP developer. But instead we got an email from a developer I had briefly known at an old job whose email text was quite literally “Pick me, pick me!” When I called him he told me that PHP was really not what we should use, rather we should build the project in this thing called Ruby on Rails which he’d gotten into. Back in February of 2006, Rails was still pretty new, but I trusted Ryan and we went for it.

Using Ruby was one of the best cultural decisions we made as it brought us to using test driven development, version control, and a lot of agile techniques. These days here in Melbourne, Australia we operate one of the largest, most respected Ruby outfits.

How much cash did you need to get up and running?
So to get started we spent about $40,000 or so, plus a lot of sweat and hard work. The money came from the cofounders’ savings and was pretty much the sum total of those savings!

Early on the project didn’t go as we’d hoped. By July we’d burned through all the money, exhausted our credit cards, and were busy working our freelance design jobs as well as trying to build and work on FlashDen at night time. For a little while there I recall wondering if the whole thing was going to flop.

But happily by August we chopped out a lot of the ‘nice to have’ features, cleaned it all up a bit and managed to launch.

Ta’eed: “Back in late 2009 after we’d moved to the new office in Melbourne.” Back row, L to R: James, Naysan, Oz, Justine, Lucas, Stu, Rod, John, Skellie, Erin, Jordan. Front row seated, L to R: Collis, Fred, Cyan, Vahid, Ryan.”

The first time you hear Gary Vaynerchuk talk about how he’s going to buy the New York Jets, you’ll probably let out a chuckle. The second time you hear it, you’re still in “suure” mode. The third time, you start to believe that Gary is fucking serious. By the fourth time, you know he is.

Once that realization sinks in, it’s a new day. Here’s a guy with such an outlandish goal, given where he is today. And he believes that it’s actually going to happen. He’s actually working towards making it happen. It might have a long horizon, but every day is a tiny bit of work going into making that happen.

That’s incredibly inspiring. If Gary can think it’s okay to work towards owning the Jets, then I can surely work towards turning 37signals into a $100 million/year company. Or race the 24 hours of Le Mans and stand on the podium at the end of it.

Now something magic happens when you believe that your big goals are achievable and you make those goals public. You start thinking, plotting, and doing all the little steps that are going to take you there.

Hey, if I’m going to stand on the podium of Le Mans, I better start racing a car that’ll be similar to that and in a series that’s going there. If we’re going to turn 37signals into a $100 million/year company, we better start thinking about how we can keep more customers from canceling during their trial.

So what’s your big goal? Make it public and we’ll egg you on.

Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos.

But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even serious publications like Forbes jump on for a ride. It’s time to take deep breath and take a look at reality.

Minority investment valuations aren’t real
Facebook is now supposedly worth $33,000,000,000, but that number is entirely based on what star-struck minority investors have paid for a tiny slice of the company.

The company has supposedly taken just under a billion dollars in venture capital and small secondary-market sales of stock. So the actual money that has changed hands is just 3% of the total valuation of the company!

In other words, the valuation is resting on the flawed assumption that Facebook could actually ever get 33 times as much money to change hands if they wanted to. There’s just no way, no how that’s happening right now. If it could, they’d IPO tomorrow.

So the Facebook valuation based on minority investments is in my mind a complete joke in the sense that there was $33,000,000,000 dollars on the table. Irrational investor exuberance indeed.

You’re only worth something if you can make money to keep
If you boil it down to what valuations really should be about, discounted future cash flow, it gets completely bizarro-world funny. The rumor is that Facebook will be generating a billion dollars in revenue. That’s certainly real money, right?

Wrong. Real money is what’s left over after you pay your expenses. If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million from Elevation Partners just three months ago.

But let’s be charitable. Let’s imagine that Facebook miraculously made $200 million this year — a 20% margin. (I don’t think that’s true, otherwise why take another $120 million from Elevation Partners, but hey, let your imagination roam). That would put Facebook’s P/E at some 165.

That’s about 7.5 times as much as Google, the golden cash cow of the internet world. Would you seriously think that Facebook is 7.5 times as good or as promising a business as Google? Get outta here.

No outrageous profits after seven years and half a billion users
Oh, well, but maybe Facebook just needs to mature, you say. If we give them just a few more years, the profit fairy might drop by and sprinkle her billions all over Facebook and its shareholders. I call fat chance.

Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.

Now this was all fun and games until somebody promised the Newark schools $100 million in stock based on the fantasy valuation of his under-profiting company. But now it’s real. They’re selling the skin before they shot the bear or peeing their pants to get to the hut or whatever you want to call it. It’s just not good, alright?

Related: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
Related: Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math

Starting a new company is full of chaos and uncertainty. There are plenty of very reasonable things to worry about, like, will we make any money? Do we have the right product? How do we find any customers? But these are often not the things starters choose to worry about.

Instead, they worry about things they should be so lucky to encounter. Will my software platform scale if I get 10,000 customers per day? Do we have the right strategic plan for the next three years? What should our stock option plan look like so it’ll cope with 100+ people?

To make something of yourself, you can only worry about so much. There’s a certain set of worry slots available and if you fill them with all these possibly-maybe concerns, there won’t be any left for things that’ll matter tomorrow.