I will keep this short and to the point. A lot of news I see on tech blogs all revolve around the same type of start-up. A start-up gets X amount of seed money, or X amount of additional round of funding, or takes on SUPER CEO Joey Wallnuts, or has some outrageous claim about growth, and how using Node.js makes their work desks levitate.
In many cases, these places are not profitable, and in some cases, never intended to be. Their main goal is likely to flip the start-up and sell it off at the peak of it’s valuation before the shit hits the fan. Before people realize that what they are building is a pile of shit.
So what do they do? The CEO and investors pump up the start-up by feeding tech blogs heaps of bullshit that they can write about as if they are facts. Before you know it, the bullshit keeps mounting and the start-up has a very high valuation in a year or two. The pump and dump is complete and the investors make their money and move on to the next victim.
Another successful start-up saves the internets yet again!
The problem? These are not real companies. They should not be refereed to as real companies. The real start-ups out there are ones you’ve never heard of. In fact, it’s an insult to call them start-ups. They are internet companies, whose main goal is profitability and longevity.
The average bootstrapped company’s story is boring. It often includes keeping costs down with slow but consistent growth over several years. The stack the company is built on is nothing special, either Rails or PHP. They failed to get funding or tech press. The problems they solve are often terribly boring, possibly highly technical, employs a handful of people, and worse yet, no one gets rich overnight. They tend to put their head down, plug away, and grow something out of nothing with hard-work instead of smoke and mirrors.
Talk about a snoozefest. These may not be interesting, but they are the companies you should root for and aspire to be a part of.
This post is for you.