50 Big Companies that Started with Little or No Money

Solving an old problem with a new technology or UX layer can be enough to build a multi-billion dollar business.

• Shopify: Shopify’s founders were searching for a shopping cart solution when they were setting up an eCommerce site for snowboarders. Unable to find one, they decided to scratch their own itch and built a bespoke solution on the then red-hot Ruby on Rails framework. 
• Braintree Payments: Exchanging money online, without being fleeced by fraudsters, is one of the oldest problems on the web. 

• Ipsy: Youtuber Michelle Phan leveraged her online celebrity — 8M+ YouTube subscribers — to turn it into a phenomenon. 
• ShutterStock: Jon Oringer combined his set of skills and used 30,000 photos from his personal photo library to start a stock photo service.
• Quizlet: it was founded by a precocious 15-year-old who wanted to ace his French final.
• Skyscanner: The company started as a bespoke spreadsheet to help its founder find the best flight prices.

Funding doesn’t always come millions of dollars at a time. Founders can scrape together money from grants, incubators, and angels, or even pre-sales.

• CoolMiniOrNot: it started out as a website where geeks could show off their ability to paint Dungeons & Dragons figurines. 
• The Wirecutter: Who says blogging doesn’t pay? Founded by a former Gizmodo editor, the Wirecutter promised more thorough and fair-minded reviews, and paired that with Amazon affiliate feed.

• RXBar: When one of the entrepreneurs behind RXBar shared his ambitious business plan with his father, he told his founder son “You need to shut up and sell 1,000 bars.”
• Scentsy: They sold candles at swap meets when they couldn’t afford to buy ads.
• Spanx: Shark Tank judge Sara Blakely turned a $5,000 investment into an Oprah-approved approved garment that generates $400M in revenue annually. 
• Grammarly: Spell checkers around for decades, but Grammarly made enough improvements that they could charge over 800 universities and hundreds of thousands of writers.

• ButcherBox has thrived, earning as much as a million dollars a week by skipping expensive ad channels and developing ongoing, capital-efficient relationships with influencers.
• Cards Against Humanity: They’ve sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, etc.
• GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a product. Paired with hyper-efficient Conversion Rate Optimization, it can be unbeatable. 

• PaintNite: While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital.
• Tough Mudder: Track & field entrepreneur Will Dean turned $7,000 in savings into a company with over $100 million dollars in annual revenue. 

• Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people, and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion dollar acquisition.
• Craigslist: Craigslist parlayed an early launch in the first dot-com boom into a durable long-term advantage. Craigslist is the #17 most visited site in the US.

• SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s; it survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started.
• Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers, over $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix.
• GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital.

Wayfair was profitable from its first month of operation and grew profitably for a decade until they ultimately raised a series A. the company is currently worth $6 billion dollars and because they suffered little dilution, the founders are worth a billion dollars each. Zip recruiter: “we started out with humble ambitions, to Bootstrap a lifestyle business,” said Co-Founder/Ceo Ian Siegel.

• Wayfair: The company is currently worth $6 billion dollars and because they suffered little dilution, the founders are worth a billion dollars each!
• Zip Recruiter: “We started out with humble ambitions, to bootstrap a lifestyle business,” said Co-founder/CEO Ian Siegel in an interview with Alex Konrad from Forbes. Those ambitions were met and superseded.
• Nerdwallet: The personal finance service that promises to help young people save money lived on a tight budget from the time it was founded in 2009 until it a raised $64M series A in 2015.

Venture capital has powered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Zappos. Just remember that you don’t need a penny to get started. You don’t need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. So the next time a VC tells you they “pass,” remember these three principles:

• It’s possible to get a tech-enabled business off the ground with no capital.
• It’s feasible to scale a tech business rapidly with very little capital.
• It’s often in the founder’s best interest to limit the amount of capital they take.