Hello, I’m very excited about this forum as I’ve been looking for somewhere to discuss bootstrapped products ever since we launched our product over four years ago.
I have run a company since September 2001 called edgeofmyseat.com. I started the company as a web development consultancy, mostly doing development for design agencies (in Perl, Classic ASP and ultimately PHP). My husband Drew McLellan joined the company as a partner 6 years ago. Just over 4 years ago we launched a product, a little CMS called Perch. We bootstrapped the product from the profits of the consulting business and it was profitable (in terms of cash spent on it, not time) within 24 hours of going on sale.
Over the last four years we have done less consultancy and more work on Perch and this year we stopped doing development for other people. Other than writing and speaking gigs, Perch is now all that we do.
I love helping other people with business related things, I love finding out about interesting products and enjoy helping to spread the word about other bootstrapped products. I feel as if we need to celebrate our successes as a community, as “bootstrapped company is supporting founder and family” is never going to make headlines, but is significant in our world.
