Why We Are Bootstrapped (And Why You Should Care)

"How much money have you raised?"

You hear this question a lot in founder circles. Funding announcements get press coverage. VCs sit on panels. Founders post on LinkedIn about closing their Series B.

For us? We are bootstrapped. Well, mostly. We raised a seed round early on, then bought most of that investment back. We did not want to be on the venture train.

If you're wondering why we are telling you this, or why it matters to you as a customer, keep reading.

The Graveyard Is Real

The DTC and eCommerce operations space is littered with VC-backed companies that are gone. Enterprise SaaS made up a big chunk of startup shutdowns in recent years.

You have probably experienced this. You sign a contract, integrate a system, train your team. Then you get an email: "We have been acquired" or "We are shutting down" or "update on our licensing model." No matter how you look at it, it reads: "I am getting screwed over". Your workflows break. Your data needs migrating. Your team scrambles.

Look at the inventory and order management space alone: Stitch Labs (acquired by Square in July 2020, shut down Spring 2021, gave customers less than a year to migrate), TradeGecko (acquired by Intuit/QuickBooks in August 2020, discontinued as standalone product June 2022), Inventory Source (simply shut down), and Shipstation (through their parent company Stamps.com acquisition by PE Firm Thoma Bravo in 2021, doubled prices within 30 days).

These were not failing companies. They had customers, products, and funding. So what happened?

How the VC Model Actually Works

Most startups follow this path: seed round from angels, then Series A where you get institutional money and a VC on your board, then Series B, C, and so on.

Behind those VCs are Limited Partners (LPs): institutional investors like university endowments and pension funds. A VC fund typically has 10-12 years to generate returns and return that money to LPs.

Here is where it gets interesting: VC returns follow a power law distribution.

In a typical VC portfolio, a small percentage of startups (around 10%) deliver disproportionately large returns (often 90% or more of total returns). The rest deliver moderate gains, small losses, or total write-offs. Among top-performing VCs, just 4.5% of invested capital generates 60% of the fund's returns.

Look at the examples: Peter Thiel's $500K investment in Facebook turned into $1.1 billion (a 2,200x return). Kleiner Perkins invested $12.5M in Google for a 10% stake, and that single investment made their entire fund.

What This Means for You

The power law creates specific incentives. VCs aren't trying to build sustainable businesses. They are swinging for moonshots. Peter Thiel explicitly states that investors should only invest in companies where they think they can get a 10x return.

If you are one of the 1-2 potential moonshots in a portfolio, your board pushes you toward an exit: either acquisition or IPO. Growth becomes the only metric that matters. You acquired customers unprofitably, kept them unprofitably. Now you need to fix the economics fast. What happens next? Raise prices. Cut support and engineering teams. Service quality drops. The product gets neglected because you are optimizing for an exit, not for customers.

Not a moonshot? You crash and burn. Most shutdowns happen because companies run out of cash. They cannot find product-market fit, cannot become profitable, or raised at valuations so high they cannot raise another round.

This gets worse. The traditional funding path for B2B companies has essentially closed. 44% of VC investment in 2024 went to AI-native companies. Your SaaS vendor raised money in 2021, burned through it, and now needs their Series B. But VCs are only writing checks for AI companies. They cannot raise. They shut down.

Either way, you (the customer) lose.

Why We Build Different

We build Fulfil because we do not know what else we would do with our lives.

The work is simple: make software that does not get in your way. To build that, we sit with accountants during close, stand in warehouses during peak. We watch where the software slows you down, where you build workarounds, where it fails you. We ship updates every single day based on what we see. We have done this since 2015.

That is why we bought back our seed investment. We saw where the VC train was headed. Board pressures to optimize for exits instead of customers. Fund timelines forcing unsustainable growth. Eventual price increases to fix the economics.

We do not obsess over growth metrics. We obsess over understanding our users. CSAT and feedback matter more than growth at all costs. When you tell us something is broken, that is more valuable than hitting an arbitrary revenue target.

We do not have board members pushing us toward an exit. We do not have a fund timeline forcing us to optimize for acquisition metrics. We do not have LPs expecting 10x returns that require us to dramatically raise prices or gut support.

We have you. Your feedback shapes our product. Your operational challenges drive what we build. Your success determines our success.

This is our life's work.

That is why we are bootstrapped. And that is why it matters.