Drupal Startups

Entrenio provides affordable financial data APIs and analytics tools to developers and investors. Rachel Carpenter and Joey French spent 1.5 years learning to code and building a valuation app, hit a wall with $50k/month data licensing costs, and pivoted to build their own data sourcing technology using machine learning. They bootstrapped on a $100k friends-and-family investment for 3 years while bartending and living frugally, finding their core market through SEO and Quora, and eventually landing on developers as their primary target after initially focusing on institutional investors.

Bitnami, founded in 2013 (building on predecessor BitRock since 2005), provides a catalog of over 140 packaged applications across 14 different platforms for leading cloud vendors like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. With over one million deployments per month, the company generates revenue by selling to cloud vendors directly and is launching a new productized offering for corporate IT departments in Q1. Almost entirely bootstrapped with $2M from Y Combinator and convertible notes, Bitnami has grown to 75 employees across San Francisco and distributed globally.

SiteManager is a web design platform focused on helping freelance designers and small agencies with collaboration tools and resource management. Launched in March 2017, the company reached $14,000 MRR with 138 customers by the time of this interview, targeting $50,000 MRR before their next funding round. With $850,000 in secured funding (government loans, bank loans, and private equity), the team of 7 achieved healthy unit economics with a 1% monthly gross churn rate.