Thousands of bootstrapped SaaS founders have built valuable software companies that created serious wealth for the founders.
But few of these entrepreneurs started with the only goal of making that much money. It’s an entrepreneurial paradox.
They always focus on building, customers, freedom, and control first.
The money came much, much later for these winners.
Bootstrappers usually live lean for a long time, and the odds are against you.
Rachit Khatoris the founder and CEO of Stackby, a no-code spreadsheet and database app builder that allows business users to create powerful spreadsheet-like applications with data links, automations, and workflows.
Rachit and his team of 34 employees live in Surat, India, north of Mumbai. Surat is his hometown and it has a growing software startup community.
Stackby started when Rachit was working for a corporate venture firm in Michigan. He was doing repetitive manual data imports and analysis in Excel, so he hired a developer to build a better tool and started selling Stackby to early customers.
They followed customer feedback to build an inexpensive and easy-to-use app that, for specific use cases, competes well with VC-funded competitors like AirTable.
This bootstrapped company has grown to serve 75,000 free and paid business customers in four years. It is now profitable, and revenues are growing at 15% per month. They upsell free business users to paid plans.
They have lived lean for 5 years, but Rachit has big ambitions for Stackby to serve millions of customers and be an example of success in the Surat software community.
He gives this advice to ambitious startup entrepreneurs in Surat:
“If you just want to make money, it’s better that you should have a job. If you’re smart, you can easily make 200 grand a year and have a decent-enough lifestyle.
“But if you’re really, truly passionate and money is not the only motivation for you, you should give entrepreneurship a try and take it on. You will make less at first, but you might make a lot more make a lot more with delayed gratification.
“You have to do it for the right reasons to keep going and not stop when you meet big challenges.”
Rachit wants to build a large and valuable company, but first it needs to be great for his customers, employees, and himself.
He doesn’t have any investors and Stackby is profitable. He has kept the precious ability to have that choice.
Check out the inspiring interview with Rachit Khator on the Practical Founders Podcast.
