How To Bootstrap Yourself To 150 Million Downloads And A Positive Cash Flow
Do you know TutoTOONS? The Barcelona based startup that has been flying (high) under the radar for about three years now.
The company has built a powerful platform for creating your own mobile games without any coding skills. They recently reached 150 million game downloads, and that without a single cent in funding.
One and a half years ago the startup became cash flow positive, and have now grown to team of 25 people, and are still growing.
Creating a game through their platform is free, but if you sell the game you split your earnings with TutoTOONS, 50–50.
Team, team, team
It’s not usually the bootstrapped tech startups that get featured in the big international tech outlets, even though it’s often these companies that deserve being studied the most.
Damien Bruneau is one of five co-founders and growth hacker at TutoTOONS. He explains that many investors told them that a big team of founders could be tricky, but he sees this as one of their main strengths:
To have five co-founders that equally care about the company, and have diverse backgrounds has been great. We could basically run the whole company without costs for the first year.
He thinks (1) keeping costs to a minimum, (2) starting out with a strong and diverse team, (3) and not taking a no for an answer, are three vital points when building a project without funding.
There’s no perfect model for bootstrapping a company, but I definitely think more people could do it.
There was a couple of times we were close to raising money.
One of the great things with a big round of funding, is that you can attract great developers. Bruneau says they have to focus on other things than salaries when hiring talent.
We’ve been able to hire super talented people solely because we have a product people are excited to develop. For great developers, I think working on something exciting and challenging is much more important than a huge salary.
Years without a salary
Today TutoTOONS is a success story, but behind every minute of success, there are 10 unpaid hours of hard work and focus, the co-founder explains.
The two first years were very though, to go years without a salary is no joke.
Bruneau thinks too many founders today are way too busy getting funded:
So many entrepreneurs are only thinking about how much investment they will raise, or how fast they can raise another round. Some industries require a lot of investment to grow, but many startups could grow fast without vast amounts of cash.
He admits that bootstrapping requires more from each of the team members.
Even though everyone has their own tasks, we all help out where it’s needed, for example we don’t have an HR person.
Keeping in contact with investors
As TutoTOONS has been getting press for reaching millions of downloads, and also winning awards and trips to pitch in Silicon Valley, many investors have been contacting the company.
Even though we’ve never taken funding from anyone, there’s several VC’s we’ve kept in touch with over the years.
Bruneau explains that he finds value in getting feedback from the investors.
They ask you really hard questions about the company that other people don’t, that has been very helpful for us.
Unexpected bootstrapping
It was never the initial plan for TutoTOONS to go so many years without money, says Bruneau:
Starting up, I never thought we would be able to go so many years without funding.
They started out with an idea of an Edtech platform, but quickly abandoned the idea, as it was hard to monetize, and the gaming industry had bigger momentum at the time.
As we decided to focus on games, we needed to choose to either emphasize on volume or quality — we chose quality.
They’ve now reached 150 million game downloads without a marketing budget, it’s all organic according to the company. They cross-promote their new games through already popular games, and this is basically how they grow.
After building up some money in the bank, TutoTOONS will now focus more on the volume side of the business.
We’re operating with the same goals as most companies, but when you’re bootstrapping you might have to take a different route than other well-funded entrepreneurs do.
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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.
