- 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”.
- nQ Zebraworks $1.0M
- Better Agency $1.0M
- Salonist.io $1.0M
- SalesQualia $1.0M
- Finimize $1.0M
- Directive Consulting $20.0M
- Recruiter.com $20.0M
- QuestionPro $20.0M
- Hostinger $19.8M
- Adjetter $19.7M
- Campus-Management $100.0M
- Hotschedules $100.0M
- EBSCO $99.8M
- Infostretch $95.4M
- Harvest $93.7M
- 01
Intesa
SaaS Software
Intesa offers services in corporate digitalization and provides SaaS services and solutions to its clients.
$40B
11M
1987
—
355
Italy
- 02
Photoshop
Information Technology Software
Provider of online platform for photo editing. The company provides software for image enhancement, photograph corrections and editing. It also provides products such as photoshop lightroom, photoshop elements and photoshop express.
$13B
10M
1987
—
852
United States
- 04
Spie SA
Field Service Management Software
SPIE is a provider of multi-technical services. The company offers services in the areas of instrumentation, industrial piping, automated systems, traffic management, home automation and multimedia. It offers electrical, mechanical, HVAC engineering servic
$8B
19K
1900
—
19K
France
- 05
Bechtle
Information Technology & Services
Bechtle is a Germany-based provider of information technology (IT) systems and technology. The company operates through two segments: IT System House and Managed Services, and IT E-Commerce. The IT System House and Managed Services segment comprises the sa
$7B
70K
1983
—
4K
Germany
- 07
CSRA
Information Technology Software
CSRA is a provider of information technology and consulting services. The company is engaged in providing information technology and professional consulting services to government clients, homeland security and health sectors so as to modernize legacy syst
$5B
45K
2015
—
3K
United States
- 08
Beeline
Enterprise Software
Operator of a SaaS company that dealing with workforce intelligence services. The company's software services specialize in optimizing the non-employee workforce management and is designed to money, reduce risks to the organization and add value to its cli
$5B
1M
1999
—
1K
United States
- 09
Kakao Corp
Analytics Software
Kakao provides a platform for mobile messaging applications that offers in-application texting, mobile gaming platform, photo sharing social network and voice calls. The firm also invests through an entrepreneur funds that focusing on young companies that
$4B
47M
2014
—
12K
South Korea
- 10
Charles-River Development
Financial Services Software
Solutions and services that automate multi-asset front and middle office investment management functions for institutional, wealth and alternative managers.
$3B
1K
1984
—
999
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.