What are some startups that never raised money from VCs or Angels and still made it?

Question

I am planning to research all these companies and find if they had some common traits

Vikas Jha · Accepted Answer

Primary reason for not raising :

As a founder, I have no interest in exit or liquidity. I am in business to run a business, not to run away from it. Or as Warren Buffet puts it: Our favorite holding period is forever.

https://www.zoho.com/general/blog/why-we-haven-t-taken-venture-capital.html

Tejas Kinger · Answer

Founded in 2001, Kayako is a customer service platform company that is bootstrapped. It has 30,000+ customers around the globe, 150+ employees, $5 million in revenue and rivals Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.

Raj Anand · Answer

I believe hunter in it's own right is making it big and they don't want to raise money. Here is an interview with the founder Antoine Finkelstein who confirmed that they are profitable and not looking for any funding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufgXE28BqyU

Halim Muhammad · Answer

Their tech is brilliant even Google's engineers love it, they  are awesome and they are raking in millions
.

Leandro · Answer

Created by @levelsio, a one man startup.

John · Answer

The most helpful creative company in the world. Design Pickle was founded in 2015 by Russ Perry to help small businesses find a reliable graphic designer with an easy-to-use system to submit design requests. To date, Design Pickle has completed over 100,000 design requests and currently staffs over 85 people across the world.

gokul · Answer

Best tech news aggregator.

Shashwat Pradhan · Answer

We monetised early on and invested in user growth. We also diversified into other niches.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

Basecamp (37signals) the maker of web based productivity tools, founded in 1999 is another successful bootstrapped startup.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

MailChimp, a marketing automation and email marketing service founded in 2001 is yet another bootstrapped behemoth. It has a user base of approx. 450,000 users who send over 10 billion emails using the platform.