GTM Sauce

Handwrytten · robot-written handwritten notes

Stay bootstrapped and US-only instead of raising money to expand

Profitable (~$350K in 2025) but growth hampered; revenue dipped

Mixedfinancingmarket-selection

What they did

Never raised outside rounds; founder owns 100%. Declined to expand into Europe to avoid distraction given US opportunity; considering fulfilling UK demand from the US (e.g. via acquiring a UK player) instead.

What happened

Profitable (~$350K in 2025) and 100% owned, but founder says growth has been hampered; revenue dipped 2024->2025

In their words

Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M

Play from 9:45

… did okay. Okay. Yeah. So that was a very meaningful, obviously, cash life event for you. So what keeps you motivated? Are you just sort of a builder and handy written is where you sort of scratch that builder itch? Yeah. So, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's handwritten. You were not the first one to call it handy written. I'm sorry. Thank you. It's handwritten. Yeah. And then plus, I've got young kids at home, relatively young kids at home.

9:45

So it's not like we're going to go travel the world. They need to be in school. So it's a little bit of that too. I mean, we've got a lot of really savvy investors that listen to this show, a lot of builders that have an exit open for the next thing. If someone came and offered you a hundred million all cash to sell the business, do you sell? Oh, heck yeah. For a company that's growing like 20% a year, hopefully. Absolutely. Yeah. I think our growth has been hampered a lot. by organic growth. You know, we're not, we haven't taken any rounds. And because of that,

10:15

we're growing slower, but we're growing profitably and smartly and, you know, that type of thing. You know, there's been talks about expanding into Europe, but the problem is there's so much opportunity here. I just don't need the distraction of dealing with Europe, you know? Well, go deeper on your inbound for a second, because, I mean, you have a very strong CO footprint. I mean, you've put this article out, best wishes, good luck messages. It brings in almost 14,000 clicks to the website on a monthly basis. Your overall domain rating is above a 70,

10:48

which is very strong, getting 40,000 organic clicks a month. Was this sort of SEO strategy? Was this tactical and specific? An agency runs this for you or you do it? We do it all internally. Yeah, I have a woman that writes articles. Because SEM doesn't work, We've gone the SEO route. Now we're going to start with social media advertising. We're doing a lot of social media posting, obviously, but now we're going to be doing social media …

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: bootstrapped, us-focus, no-europe