Bootstrapping Cases: Mailchimp, Shopify, and Shutterstock

Start a business with a problem you have encountered yourself, or a common problem your customers face! Mailchimp—in 2000, Mailchimp CEO Ben Chestnut was running a small design consultancy. Many of his clients wanted him to create online newsletters. That was not difficult, but he disliked this kind of design work; it was just too tedious. His solution was to build a tool that simplified the entire process, which he named Mailchimp. Today, his startup has more than $700 million in revenue and more than 500 employees. Best of all, he achieved all this without any funding from venture capital firms. Software giant Intuit ultimately acquired Mailchimp for more than $10 billion. Shopify—the founders of the Shopify shopping-cart system were looking for a shopping-cart solution because they wanted to build an e-commerce site for snowboard enthusiasts. They could not find one they liked, so they decided to build their own. It turned out that many other startups needed the same solution, which eventually became their main business. The founders operated the company for a full six years without raising any venture capital. Today, Shopify is a large publicly traded company with a market capitalization of more than $170 billion. Shutterstock (an online stock-photo site)—serial entrepreneur Jon Oringer encountered a problem: when creating marketing materials and websites for his own company, he could not find high-quality artwork and photographs at a reasonable price. With almost no other options, he picked up his digital camera and began creating his own. Eventually, he selected 30,000 photographs from his personal collection and used them as the foundation for Shutterstock, one of the world’s largest online stock-photo sites. The company went public without raising money from any venture capital firm. Its market capitalization is now close to $4 billion. #穿越寒冬 #SurvivingAStartup