This founder bootstrapped his company to a $110M acquisition in 5 years. (But, I’d bet you’ve never heard of them before)

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That company is 'Stamped'. Not familiar? I’m not surprised.

You’ll have little trouble finding plenty of news on:

➡️ Startups raising millions in funding

➡️ Major layoffs or controversy

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But stories of sustainable, bootstrapped companies? Very few. A quick Google search only brings up a couple of search results on the story. Tommy Ong is a serial entrepreneur with two exits under his belt.

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He saw a new opportunity - Online merchants struggling with consumer trust:

↳ Built his V1 of Stamped in two days to simplify customer review collection

↳ Surpassed $700K in revenue in the first year

↳ 3 years later - the business was 10x the size

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In 2021 they were acquired by WeCommerce - a Canadian company.

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It’s really impressive.

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↳ Tommy saw a gap that few noticed.

↳ Acted on it and built an MVP to capture part of a major growing market at the time.

↳ Created true value and sticky revenue that roped them a nice exit.

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This is the story we should be telling to founders. It’s these under-the-radar companies like these that more founders need to hear about and learn from. Not glorified ‘growth-at-all-costs’ furnaces. There are many roads to success. 🛣️ The ‘unicorn’ path is one of them, Tommy showed us there is another way too.

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P.S. [I don’t know Tommy personally. He’s not one of our portfolio companies - just a story I thought was worth sharing]

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