Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: TechSmith, Litmus, iData, and A Small Orange

Below: We’re getting so many submissions for our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series that it’s tough to find room to profile everyone. So here’s a roundup post featuring a quick look at several different companies that have $1M+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.

Litmus
Litmus is a tool for email marketers. It helps them test their email designs across a range of different email clients. The founders attended 37signals’ Building of Basecamp workshop in Copenhagen and afterwards self-funded the business. It’s now “significantly above $1m in revenue, very profitable, and growing by around 10% every month,” according to founder Paul Farnell.

Litmus shows you screenshots of your email newsletter as it looks across all major email clients.

According to Farnell, there is no exit strategy:

We have no plans for a big “exit”. Being acquired and working for years at a big company sounds terrible to me. Why would we want to give up the flexibility and freedom we have right now? To us it’s not just about money, it’s about enjoying what we do and believing in it.

I wouldn’t advise starting something you’re not passionate about. It’ll be your life for the next 5+ years. Make sure you relish the idea of spending 12+ hours a day thinking about it.

Here’s his take on competitors:

I attended Geoffrey Moore’s talk at the Business of Software conference last year. What he said really stuck with me, and changed the way I think about what we do.

We have a handful of competitor’s doing a similar thing. For a couple of years we watched them closely and tried to keep up with them in terms of features. It felt like there were things we “had” to have, in order to be comparable. That was wrong. What Moore discusses is being competitive by innovation, not by keeping up on features. It’s similar to your own ideas about underdoing the competition.

Since then we’ve made some big calls not to build features that other people already have. We decided they weren’t necessary. Turns out they’re not! Since ignoring our competitors and focussing on what new and interesting things we can build, we’ve been happier, more productive, and seen more success.

Visit Litmus.

A Small Orange
Douglas Hanna is CEO of hosting company A Small Orange and writes, “A Small Orange has had over $1,000,000 in revenue for more than three years now and has been well in the green pretty much since it was founded. We have 13 full-time employees and about 25,000 or so customers.”

Here’s why his company emphasizes customer support:

The hosting industry has undergone a lot of consolidation and bigger companies and investment groups tend to view customer service as a cost center instead of a potential profit center. When I do our books, I’m tempted to split up our support costs as half marketing and half operating expenses. When we provide great service (which we try to do as frequently as possible), our customers notice and appreciate that. A lot of times it results in them telling their friends and social networks about us, which leads to more sales and greater customer loyalty. Companies that view customer service as a necessary evil to prevent customers from canceling miss out on that and have to market with their wallets instead of their customers.

Visit A Small Orange
Photos of the company’s datacenter.