Bootstrapped to $1M MRR in 3.5 Years on Shopify

It happened - we've reached $1 million in MRR. $0 raised, fully bootstrapped, fully remote, never had an office. It took 3.5 years. Here's my honest advice to other builders out there: 1. Choose the right market. I had 3 good reasons to start building on Shopify. 1) I had experience with Shopify having launched few ecom brands myself. 2) I had lots of clients on Shopify helping them with design, CRO, etc. 3) I had prior experience with Shopify apps as a user. Combined with my 10+ years product design experience it was a no brainer to try building on this platform. Last but not least, I’m truly passionate about ecommerce, therefore my primary goal was always to help merchants, not just earn money. 2. Be obsessed with helping people. During our first year we were handling customer support ourselves (while building the product and freelancing full-time). Our median response time was under one minute. It meant I was ALWAYS online, always ready to help, even if it meant replying Friday 3AM while dancing at the club. The fact that we managed to keep this level of support at a scale of 80,000 active users and 300+ daily tickets is the reason why we’re winning. 3. Don’t hire too early In the early stage, founders MUST do all the work themselves, because no one understands your product, your customers, or your mission better than you do. E.g. customer support might seem like the first thing to outsource, but if I had outsourced it early, I would never have developed the processes that now bring us over 400 five-star reviews each month. Before bringing people in, you need to master the core aspects yourself. Btw, we reached $100K MRR with a team of four (two founders + two contractors). 4. Don’t raise from VCs VCs need 100x returns, so anything short of unicorn-level growth is considered failure. That pressure pushes founders to burn cash, scale too fast, pivot too early, forget profits, and gamble on unrealistic outcomes instead of building something sustainable. A steady 10% MoM growth and $10K MRR with 80% profitability - a dream for any bootstrapped founder - is total failure for VCs. Staying independent let us grow profitably, at our own pace, without chasing someone else’s lottery ticket. 5. Replicate your success It took us 2 years to scale our first ever Shopify app to $6.5K MRR and sell it for $250K. With all the learnings, we launched a new app in a much more competitive niche, used the same playbook and reached $100K MRR in about a year. Soon enough I realised our playbook works so we started scaling horizontally, launching more apps, benefiting from integrations/cross promotion and proven processes. Currently, we have 5 apps with our newest app reaching $10K MRR in 14 days. P.S. I'm just starting this journey, and I'm sharing all of it. Follow along to stay updated! 🫶