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I build and grow bootstrapped SaaS businesses with low overheads and high profits. Building human-centric solutions for an AI future with Swarm, StoryPrompt, and Sendible (acquired 2021). Podcast: Unscalable.fm
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Everyone's obsessed with team size like it's some kind of startup scorecard: - Series A? Better hire 50 people - Hit $1M ARR? Time for a VP of everything - Got press coverage? Expand the office I've played that game before with Sendible. Not this time. We will never have more than 10 people working at Swarm and StoryPrompt combined. This isn't conventional startup wisdom. But it's my playbook now. It used to be "how many people work at your startup?" was the flex. Not anymore. Small is the new big. The new flex is how small can you keep the team while maximising profits? After selling Sendible, I realised something: each new hire doesn't just cost salary. They cost me time, mental space, and the freedom to work in pyjamas! AI has changed everything. My north star metric is now profit per employee. Here's what my startup life actually looks like: - No painful weekly all-hands meetings - No HR policies about when I can take vacation - No explaining to investors why we aren't "scaling the team" faster The old way: raise millions, hire hundreds, burn cash, pray revenue catches up. My way: build something people want, charge money for it, and keep the team small enough that we can all fit in one Uber. Here's to building businesses that make sense from day one. Small teams. Real profits.
The fastest customer breakup I’ve ever had: New trialist just asked for a UI label change → we said "we'll review next week" → they asked to delete their account 😳 Honestly? Bullet dodged. If they're demanding before paying, imagine what comes after. Learned this lesson the hard way at Sendible - saying yes to everything creates expectations you can’t maintain. The best customers give feedback but respect your process. The worst ones think their needs trump your entire roadmap. Not every customer is the right customer. And sometimes "no" is the most profitable word in business
We're noticing something interesting on Swarm - the "homework model" is crushing it right now. Creators aren't just dropping content. They're requiring action. A salsa teacher in our community has students submit practice videos after each lesson. She gives personalized feedback on technique. Guitar teacher doing the same - students submit recordings as they progress through material. The completion rates and retention are insane compared to passive consumption communities. Makes sense when you think about it. People don't pay for content (that's free everywhere). They pay for transformation. And transformation requires action + feedback, not just watching videos. We're seeing this work across music, dance, fitness, business coaching... basically anything skill-based. The best part? These creators are charging 2-3x more than regular memberships. Turns out people value what they put effort into.
Keep seeing crazy talented people stuck job hunting for months. Here's my 2c (hopefully it helps): After hiring hundreds at Sendible (and now building two new companies), this is what gets my attention as a founder: 👉 Video cover letters EVERY TIME. Text resumes all blur together; seeing someone's personality and communication style moved them to the top of my pile every time. 👉 Candidates who showed up to interviews with a one-page "here's what I'd improve" document - showed they were already thinking like an employee, not an applicant. 👉 People who've clearly researched us and have specific ideas. Generic, dull applications go straight to the bin. What instantly turns me off: - AI generated CVs/cover letters (so obvious) - Applications with zero company research - People who can't explain their actual impact at previous jobs - Generic skills without demonstrating results - Long CVs with excessive lists of skills and tools (doesn't impress me) How to stand out: 1. Market yourself like a product - lead with a clear promise of what you deliver 2. Include testimonials as social proof - get past colleagues to vouch for you (bonus points if it's on video) 3. Focus on how you'll benefit MY company, not just listing YOUR skills 4. Quantify past wins with specific metrics ("Increased conversion 32%") 5. Reach out to directly via DM/email instead of through crowded job boards/recruiters 6. Use LinkedIn strategically - search "hiring + [your job]" to find active opportunities As a founder, I'm not looking for someone who checks boxes. I want someone who thinks differently. The job market is tough and the approach that worked 5 years ago doesn't cut it anymore.
I'll never forget the day I saw the Slack notification: "Circle's founders just signed up for Swarm!" My heart raced. They were checking us out. Sizing up the competition. Our bootstrapped community platform was on their radar. I sat there staring at the screen, a mix of validation and dread washing over me. The big players were watching. And they were moving fast - much faster than we could with our tiny team and limited resources. That's the thing about being bootstrapped - watching competitors sprint ahead of you is one of the hardest parts of the journey. I'll be honest - seeing Circle grow their team and win over customers during our early days at Swarm was gut-wrenching. There were sleepless nights when I questioned everything we were doing. When you're bootstrapped, you don't have the luxury of rapid scaling or chasing every feature request. Each addition to the product is a careful calculation of resources. Your competitors' announcements feel like punches. Their funding rounds make headlines. Their growth metrics become industry benchmarks. And everyone has advice: "You should add this feature." "You need to pivot like they did." "Why don't you just copy what's working for them?" But here's what I've learned after building and selling Sendible: The most dangerous thing you can do is build for your competitors instead of your users. Market leaders create noise. They command attention. But what they can't do is listen the way a small, focused team can. At Swarm, we lost customers early on while finding product-market fit. It was tempting to simply clone what Circle was doing. Instead, we doubled down on what our remaining users were telling us - that genuine connection through video is what makes communities thrive. That insight wasn't visible by watching competitors. It came from listening to the quiet signal among all the noise. Bootstrapping forces you to be deliberate. To say “no” more than “yes”. To focus on what actually matters rather than what looks impressive. So if you're feeling the pressure of faster-moving competitors right now, remember this: your advantage isn't speed or resources. It's your ability to listen deeply and build intentionally. The companies that last aren't the ones that grow fastest. They're the ones that solve real problems in unique ways. That's how David beats Goliath. Not by matching them feature-for-feature, but by knowing something they don't.
"We're afraid our salary increases will be unsustainable." I hear this from founders all the time. Here's my take: The real problem isn't salaries getting "too high." It's having no system for fairly rewarding the people building your company. After growing Sendible to 50+ employees, here's what worked: - Everyone gets inflation (basic necessity) - Take % of company growth that year → raise pool - Split that pool based on who actually drove value - Double-check against Payscale so you're not way off market This approach solved 2 problems: it kept comp tied to business performance + gave us a clear formula to explain decisions. Biggest thing employees want? Just tell them HOW you decide on raises. Before we had a system? Painful convos. After? Way easier. Hot take: if someone's underperforming for their market rate... they don't get more than inflation. Simple as that.
Spent the morning analysing B2B communities - why some explode & others die. Campaign Monitor cracked the code years ago: They didn't just sell email software. They built a cult of "email geeks" to a $1B+ exit. What worked: - USEFUL resources (CSS charts hung in real offices) - Dedicated Community Manager (not just a part-timer) - Funded local meetups ($500-1k for pizza/beer) - Built galleries users referenced daily - Ran contests with visibility (winners on homepage) - Fought their users' battles (took on Microsoft for them) Tips for your B2B: 1. Know your people's actual problems 2. Help without expecting instant returns 3. Make resources worth bookmarking 4. Connect users to each other 5. Invest real budget 6. Think years, not quarters Most businesses try to extract value from customers from day one. The winners create it first.
First-time founder asked how I coded Swarm's website. Me: "I didn't. Bought a $79 Framer template and changed the colors." Him: 😳 Lesson learned from my Sendible days: Spent weeks building our first site in Ruby on Rails. Marketing needed dev release for EVERY. SINGLE. CHANGE. Nightmare! Swarm's site? Up in a weekend. The copy? That took weeks to get right. Nobody signs up because your website has custom code. They sign up because your words resonate with their problem. Save your dev resources for the product. Buy a template for your website (Framer or Webflow). Focus on the message, not the medium.
"When should I start getting my company ready to sell?" A founder asked me this over coffee yesterday. My answer surprised them: "The best acquisition strategy? Make yourself completely replaceable." Truth is, I never planned to sell Sendible. When ASG reached out, I wasn't even looking for buyers. But I'd accidentally built something they really wanted. Here's what happened: I got tired of being the bottleneck in my own business. So I read "Traction" by Gino Wickman, fell in love with the EOS framework, and went all-in. We documented everything. Like, literally everything. I built a solid leadership team and slowly moved myself out of daily operations. Eventually, I was just the vision guy. The company ran perfectly fine without me in the weeds. Turns out, that's exactly what buyers want. They're looking for a business that won't collapse the minute you walk out the door. It's like selling a house. Nobody wants to buy your messy place with you still living in it. They want a clean, move-in ready property where they can just bring their furniture and settle in. Want to build a sellable business? Stop being essential to it.
I escaped the EC2 nightmares by going 100% serverless 😮💨 ‼️ Geeky founder stuff below… At my last company, Sendible, our servers were a constant source of stress. MySQL replication breaking at random. Load balancers failing. The worst? Boarding a flight when everything went down - had to restart EC2 instances FROM MY PHONE with plane about to take off. What I’m doing differently this time with Swarm + StoryPrompt: - Built 100% serverless from day one - Lambda handling all backend processing - Vercel for speedy deployments - NoSQL DB on Firebase - Zero database replication headaches - No more 3am incident alerts Total result: I actually sleep at night now Cost benefit: Predictable scaling Time saved: Countless hours not spent "maintaining infrastructure" Wild part? Was stuck in the “we need servers” mindset for years, paying with both money AND sanity. Lesson for bootstrapped founders: the tech you don’t think about is the best tech. Serverless = peace of mind
I've been an entrepreneur for 17 years. Want to know the most valuable lesson I've learned? Just start. No really. JUST START. Every business I've ever built evolved dramatically from my initial vision. But none would exist if I'd waited for the perfect Gantt chart, the flawless business plan, or that elusive moment when I finally felt "ready".
For the first three years of my entrepreneurial journey, I fooled myself (and others) into thinking I was "extremely busy." My calendar was packed with: - Coffee meetings with "potential partners" - Conference calls about "exploring synergies" - Industry events where I collected enough business cards to wallpaper my office I felt important. I felt connected. I felt like a "real entrepreneur." I was also barely growing my business. Turns out, your calendar filling up is the entrepreneurial equivalent of vanity metrics. Looks impressive, delivers little value. The harsh reality? Most business meetings are just people feeling busy without being productive. These days, my default response is "no." Not because I'm important, but because I'm focused. That coffee chat? Let's start with an email. That conference? Show me the ROI first. That "quick call to pick your brain"? Sorry, I need a clearer purpose than that. The magic doesn't happen in meeting rooms or conference halls. It happens in the grind – when you're actually building, creating, and solving problems. So I deleted 80% of my recurring meetings, turned down 90% of coffee chats, and suddenly found something I'd been missing: Time to actually build my business.
Just slashed our AWS bill by 70% in 2 weeks 🤯 ⚠️ Techie talk ahead! Non-geeks can skip this post Our video platforms (Swarm + StoryPrompt) were bleeding $$$ on cloud costs. Bill was getting scary. Seemed unsustainable. What actually worked: - Set S3 lifecycle rules to move old vids to cheaper storage tiers - Auto-delete unusable raw uploads after 90d - Switched from Elastic Transcoder → Media Convert (50% cheaper) - Started using CloudFront for better caching of S3 files Total time invested: ~14 days Savings: 70% off monthly bill Stress reduction: priceless Most shocking part? AWS has all these cost-saving tools built in. They were just sitting there while I paid premium prices every month 🤦♂️ Lesson for bootstrapped founders: sometimes the fastest way to grow profits isn't more customers or higher prices - it's just cutting the costs — Follow me (Gavin Hammar) for weekly tips on scaling a profitable bootstrapped SaaS business.
Founder chat got spicy when someone asked about platform risk. Hope my response wasn't too brutal... OMG guys, let me tell you about when Twitter suddenly BLOCKED our API access at Sendible. No warning. Zilch 😱 Customers freaking out. Team in panic mode. Me? On hols in Mallorca trying to save the business from hotel wifi. Nightmare! Why? All bc we built on someone else's platform. They didn't like our white label offering. Just like that, access GONE. This is what nobody warns you about with API-dependent businesses. You're literally one policy change away from disaster. After 13+ yrs of that stress, my rule is simple: if your core business depends on someone else's API, your success isn't determined by customers loving you - it's determined by platforms tolerating you. Especially at scale. The bigger you get, the bigger the target on your back. That's why Swarm and StoryPrompt are built differently. No mission-critical integrations. Own your infrastructure. Own your destiny. (Anyone else been burned by platform dependencies? Drop your stories 👇) — Follow me (Gavin Hammar) for weekly tips on scaling a profitable bootstrapped SaaS business.
Stop bragging about burnout. It's not a flex. Been there, done that. 17 years of building companies taught me burnout isn't something to celebrate. Your brain makes better decisions when it's not running on fumes. Simple as that. What's actually worked for me: - No emails after 7pm - Prioritise exercise and sleep - Delegate the small stuff early - Use AI for the boring repetitive tasks - Turn meetings into walks You can build something amazing without the exhaustion badge. The most impressive founders I know protect their energy like it's their most valuable asset. Because it is.
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