Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co
Most founders think growth means adding. More features. More services. More markets. But a growing pile of evidence says the opposite is true, especially for bootstrapped companies. The ones that win tend to be the ones that cut.
The pattern keeps showing up
ConvertKit launched in 2013 as a general email marketing tool. It stalled at $1,300 a month. Founder Nathan Barry shut down his profitable course business, narrowed ConvertKit to serve professional bloggers only, and went all in on that single audience. Today it does $45 million a year.
Gumroad tried to be a platform for every kind of creator. It burned $351,000 a month. After laying off 75% of staff and stripping the product down to digital product sales, it became profitable and now generates over $20 million annually.
Mailchimp was a side project inside a web design agency. The founders killed the agency to focus purely on email for small businesses. That decision eventually led to a $12 billion acquisition by Intuit.
Remotify.co, founded by Hasan Can Soygök, operated as a freelancer agency handling project management, talent matching, and payments. The company shifted to focus solely on invoicing and payments. It now serves over 10,000 freelancers across dozens of countries, processes more than €1 million in monthly transactions. All bootstrapped.
Different industries. Different founders. Same move. Less product, more traction.
The numbers say the same thing
Pendo studied 615 software products and found that 80% of features are rarely or never used. That means most companies are spending money building things their customers ignore. The estimated waste across public cloud software companies? Up to $29.5 billion.
The Startup Genome Project analysed 3,200 startups and found that 74% of failures came from premature scaling. That includes building too many features, entering too many markets, and hiring too fast before the core product works. The startups that scaled at the right pace grew 20 times faster.
A 2025 SaaS Capital survey of over 1,000 companies found that 79% of bootstrapped businesses are profitable or break-even. Only 37% of venture-funded companies hit the same mark. Revenue per employee is also higher for bootstrapped companies: roughly $125,000 versus $95,000 for VC-backed ones. Fewer products, fewer people, better margins.
Why it’s so hard to do
If the data is this clear, why don’t more founders narrow their focus? Because it hurts.
Behavioural science calls it loss aversion. Research by Kahneman and Tversky found that losing something feels roughly twice as painful as gaining something of equal value. For a founder, killing a feature that brings in $5,000 a month feels catastrophic, even if keeping it costs $50,000 in missed opportunity elsewhere.
There’s also commitment bias. You chose this direction. You built it. You told people about it. Walking it back feels like admitting you were wrong.
Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, faced this head on. In 2014, his company had six products. Basecamp accounted for 87% of revenue. He killed the other five and renamed the entire company after its one remaining product. His reasoning: nobody does their best work spread across too many things.
Nathan Barry was even more direct. He said he shut everything else down because he’s not good at doing two things at once.
Andy Grove at Intel used a mental trick that still holds up. When he couldn’t bring himself to exit the memory chip business, he asked his co-founder: if the board fired us and brought in a new CEO, what would that person do? The answer was obvious. So they did it themselves.
It’s not always the right call
Narrowing scope works in most cases, but not all. Zoho built 55+ products and crossed $1 billion in revenue while staying bootstrapped. JetBrains runs 12+ developer tools on $400 million in annual revenue with zero outside funding.
But those companies expanded from a position of strength. They had decades of experience, shared technology platforms, and deep revenue from their core product before branching out. They earned the right to go broad.
The companies that fail by staying broad tend to diversify before they’ve nailed one thing. That’s the difference between strategic expansion and premature scaling. One builds businesses. The other accounts for nearly three quarters of startup failures.
The takeaway
For bootstrapped founders operating with small teams and tight budgets, the research points in one direction. Pick the thing your customers use the most. Pick the thing you can do better than anyone else. Cut the rest.
It sounds simple. It isn’t. Saying no to revenue without a safety net goes against every survival instinct a founder has. But the companies that grew the fastest, from ConvertKit to Mailchimp to Remotify, all made the same bet. They chose to do one thing well instead of five things poorly.
The hard part isn’t knowing what to cut. It’s bringing yourself to do it.