Small teams reaching millions in annual revenue by leveraging AI are trending — but most headlines focus on VC-backed startups. What about the teams that got there without raising a cent of external capital?
“Bootstrapped companies get a lot less media attention, because the classic startup playbook is you raise X millions, you send a press release and that becomes newsworthy,” says Marie Martens, cofounder of bootstrapped online form builder Tally, which reached $2M ARR in February with a team of five people. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I just think there’s less focus on actual revenue or profitability.”
Martens says her startup scaled by focusing on product first: “You build an MVP, get it into the hands of users as fast as possible and only then do you start growing your team.”
Below, Martens and Sandra Dajic, senior growth and marketing lead at Chatbase, which scaled to $6m ARR with 14 people, give their top tips on bootstrapping to multi-million ARR.
Marie Martens — cofounder at Tally
Get the product into users’ hands as fast as possible
Once you have a minimum viable product (MVP), get it in front of users immediately. Waiting too long risks building something no one wants — and running out of money. Your MVP doesn’t need to be perfect; ours was super scrappy but usable, and that was enough to get real feedback.
We started by sharing the product with friends and family, then moved to cold outreach through Product Hunt, a platform where product builders share their work, where our target users — founders, product teams and marketers — were active. We examined launches of products similar to ours, identified users who upvoted or commented and manually found their contact details. Then we reached out to them to say: “Hey, we’re building this product, we think you might be interested because of X, Y, Z. Do you want to try it out?” This helped us reach 1,500 users in six months.
We also created a Slack community for users to connect and give feedback. Today, those early users are our biggest evangelists.
We later launched on Product Hunt ourselves — our second product launch saw our user base double in a single day. We wrote a checklist for how to launch on the platform here.
Keep things simple; ramp up efficiency
It’s really easy to over-engineer and overthink things. To keep things simple, we focus on two metrics: how many users did we speak with this week, and what did we improve based on their feedback? Everything else is secondary.
We also tried to make our product as simple as possible to reduce customer support needs. Our goal is not to have to answer the same question twice. If a support ticket highlights something unclear or missing, we either update our help centre or fix the issue in the product itself. This keeps support volume low and our response time under four hours.
Use AI to save time
Efficiency also comes from using AI tools across the business, enabling our small team to get twice as much done. To discover useful tools, explore Reddit threads, follow founders on X and talk to people in indie hacker communities. People there often share their tech stacks and are happy to give advice — like which tools to use for collecting testimonials or analysing data.
Prioritise
Bootstrapped companies must focus on what gets results and ruthlessly prioritise. As a founder with only 24 hours in a day (and kids at home), I keep my calendar as clear as possible to focus on the product. That means I say no to 95% of requests that pop up in my inbox, and my default response to coffee meetings is “no”. The same goes for how we work as a business: if a problem can’t be broken down or solved quickly, we move on.
Keep the team lean
Our core team is four full-timers: me, my cofounder Filip Minev and two engineers. We also have a part-time social media manager and two — soon three — part-time support agents. We hire only when we really need to.
For bootstrapped companies recruiting on a budget, hire senior people who have a wide range of skills and experience — generalists rather than specialists. In small teams, people have to juggle a lot of tasks and take ownership. Both our engineers are senior and fullstack, which lets us avoid splitting front-end and back-end roles and keeps hiring costs low.
Sandra Dajic, senior growth and marketing lead at Chatbase
Build a product people actually need
Focusing on what features your competition is rolling out is just a distraction. You need to listen to your customers. At the start of this year, Chatbase evolved from being an AI chatbot for customer support to a full-on AI agent platform for customer experience. Now the agents can do things like answering complex support questions, pulling invoices from Stripe and booking meetings via Calendly — all things that our customers told us would be important for their personal workflows. That leap helped us receive a boost in usage and retention and helped us grow by 20% since the beginning of the year.
Spend money only when you’ve earned it
We had no ad budget until we hit $50K MRR (monthly recurring revenue). Before that, everything came from organic traffic and engaging with our community. Once we saw clear signals on what messaging worked and which users we retained, we began spending on Google ads.
Today, our marketing strategy is a blend of organic SEO (especially around use cases and long-tail keywords); social media posts (mainly X and LinkedIn) and Google ads.
Automate everything that doesn’t require a human touch
As an organisation, flesh out what tasks could be faster or improved with AI. We decide what to automate by asking:
? Is this repetitive?
? Does it require creativity or human judgment?
? Will automating it increase speed without lowering quality?
In marketing, we automate things like tracking competitor ads weekly, generating visual content and carousels, turning blog posts into X threads and newsletters.
We measure success by how fast we can produce impactful content without adding more people to the team. Automation is how we scale while staying lean — and we only build systems around tasks we repeat consistently.
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