- SaaS Companies
- Bootstrapped
The Top Bootstrapped SaaS Companies
These companies earned the most without funding (Click to apply)
Bootstrapping a SaaS company requires profitable growth. We went and found some of the most profitable bootstrapped SaaS companies so you could analyze how they’ve done it.
Some of the founders manage against metrics like revenue per employee. The target? $600k or higher. They won’t hire new team members until new hires add enough revenue to get back to $600k in revenue per employee. Other founders manage to a payback period of 3 months or less. Some of the most successful bootstrapped SaaS companies have instant payback periods. They upsell items like consulting, books, and event tickets to immediately recover their customer acquisition cost (CAC) so they can then re-invest it immediately. Call it a “fast money flywheel”.
- Ximble $1.0M
- Canny $1.0M
- Finimize $1.0M
- Pulseinsights $1.0M
- Comnplus $1.0M
- QuestionPro $20.0M
- Pixelandtonic $18.7M
- DesignPickle $18.4M
- Vwo $18.0M
- Inspire $16.0M
- 01
Ultimate-Software
HR Software
Ultimate Software is an American technology company that develops and sells UltiPro, a cloud-based human capital management software system for businesses.
$1B
6K
1990
—
5K
United States
- 02
Zoho
CRM and Related Software
Unique and powerful suite of software to run your entire business, brought to you by a company with the long term vision to transform the way you work.
$500M
250K
1996
—
9K
India
- 04
Zoominfo
Sales Software
Want to generate better leads? DiscoverOrg is the leading marketing and sales intelligence solution. Learn about the power of human-verified data.
$360M
15K
2000
—
1K
United States
- 05
Icims
Talent Management Software
ICIMS applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruiting software are designed to help you find and recruit the best talent while engaging the right candidates.
$250M
4K
1999
—
650
United States
- 06
Printful
Marketing Software
Printful is an 500+ person ecommerce company that prints t-shirts and other products for online stores.
$119M
200K
2013
—
1K
United States
- 07
$93M
1K
1995
—
119
United States
- 08
Act
CRM and Related Software
Act! CRM is the trusted customer relationship software for small and mid-sized businesses looking to build lasting relationships, manage leads and grow their business. Our client management software provides the freedom to tailor to your industry needs...
$90M
85K
2001
—
2K
United States
- 09
Acoustic
Marketing Automation Software
Acoustic is an independent marketing cloud platform driven by a mission to unleash the brilliance in marketers. Acoustic offers the industry’s leading open marketing ecosystem comprised of intuitive, AI-powered products that are purpose-built for marketers
$76M
4K
2019
—
840
United States
- 10
Jotform
Content Management Systems
If you need online forms for generating leads, distributing surveys, collecting payments and more, JotForm is for you. Learn more about how we can help at JotForm.com.
$75M
180K
2006
—
200
United States
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NextWhat are the fastest growing companies doing?
83 of the fastest growing companies that also have the most revenue have a clear expansion revenue strategy. On average, sales reps are selling plans where starting contract value is $4,606.
Those same companies employ 1,678 sales reps that carry a quota. The most common compensation plan used by these companies is a 1:5 ratio of sales rep on target earnings (OTE) to quota. Meaning if a rep can earn $200k in base and commissions, quota target for that year is set at 5x, or $1m in new ARR closed.
If you’re going to build a high growth SaaS company, you need to figure out how to scale with quota carrying sales reps.
Which CEO’s are the most efficient capital allocators?
We can measure this a variety of ways. Which company has the most revenue per employee? What about dollars in revenue compared to dollars raised? What about time, which founder went from $0 to $10m the fastest?
Looking deeper at dollars in revenue compared to dollars raised, bootstrappers take the cake because they self fund (denominator zero). When we look at companies that have raised at least $1m, Actito is the clear winner generating $21m in revenue, growing 100% yoy, on just 1m raised ($.05 dollars raised for every $1 of revenue).
Omnisend comes in a close second with $.08 dollars raised for every dollar of revenue. Doing $19m as of December 2020. Proposify gets honorable mention with $0.46 dollars raised (3.25m) for every dollar of revenue ($7m).
The worst performers here are companies like YayPay with $3.68 dollars raised ($14m) per dollar of revenue ($3.8m). Many of the worst performers just did a round of funding and haven’t had a chance to deploy to drive growth yet. That makes this data less valuable but still illustrative.