Tech startup anny bootstrapped six-figure funding one year after founding

5 mins

Introduction

With the founding of a tech startup, from the very beginning everything revolves around the question: How do I finance myself for the next 3 months or the next year? How do I build a motivated team and develop a product that solves customer problems? For many, the focus is on external investment. Venture capitalists and business angels make it possible to support visions financially at an early stage and to accelerate growth.

Guaranteed success through investment?

This growth strategy is fueled by daily headlines about the latest funding rounds from other (mostly U.S.) tech startups.But why do companies get so much media attention because of venture capital? An investment is a vote of confidence from a respected business expert and a signal of the company's future, explains TechCrunch's Tiffany Spencer.But an investment alone and the resulting growth are no guarantee for success. More important is a sustainable business case, which Alex Lazarow, Forbes confirms in his learnings as a VC. Last but not least, three out of four startups fail despite VC funding(Nanoglobals 2021).

Success through own sales

MailChimp shows how things can be done differently. The online marketing platform has not raised any venture capital since its founding in 2001. After almost 20 years of organic growth, the company was acquired by Intuit for $12 billion.

The financing model without external venture capitalists is known as bootstrapping. The particular challenge here is to generate revenues in the early stages of product development while minimizing ongoing costs.

Our VC experience

We at anny also started talking to potential investors early on in order to accelerate growth with the help of venture capital. However, it is often difficult for venture capitalists or business angels from outside the industry to understand the concrete pains of the customers, so the business case has to be proven by numbers and traction.The search for venture capital can also be an intensive task that can quickly tie up founders' time without taking the product any further. You have to expect to talk to at least one VC for every 50,000€ of venture capital you want to raise. That means, for example, to secure 1M€, at least 20 x contacts have to be made, 20 x pitches have to be prepared and held, 20 x financial figures have to be disclosed and valuations have to be discussed.

Sustainable vs. rapid growth

A major opportunity offered by debt capital is rapid growth and thus the acquisition of new market shares. However, this is offset by the risk of creating too large fixed cost blocks too early, e.g. through personnel and rent. If the product does not yet generate organic sales at this point, one is dependent on follow-up financing.In addition, investors often focus on pure growth (e.g., absolute user numbers) instead of sustainable growth (e.g., high revenue per user with high customer retention). This can change the orientation of the startup, so that too fast non-sustainable growth must also be financed externally in the long term.

anny-way

For these reasons, we initially paused the active search for venture capital and focused on organic financing last year. Through early and close contact with our customers, we generated feedback, insights, and revenue that enabled us to develop a unique booking platform. Independently, we have moved step by step closer to our vision: Making shared resources and services easily bookable!

Now we can proudly announce that we have achieved a turnover of over 500k€ organically in less than a year, with a six-figure profit and only a low three-digit number of customers.

With our sustainable business model as a foundation and proven customer traction, we are well-equipped for a (VC-backed), rapid growth phase in the future.

Our Success Factors

Reaching this milestone was only possible with a highly motivated team that firmly believes in the product and the vision of anny. At the same time, we have always involved our customers in product development to finance development on the one hand and maintain closeness to the market. Another critical success factor is the agility of product development. This allowed us to not only respond to customers in the short term but also quickly solve new market challenges.

Lean Startup vs. B2B

As a startup, one is often faced with agile methods and the agile manifesto for product development. A key component here is the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The idea behind it is to validate your product with customers as early as possible to gather feedback and ensure that a market problem is being solved. Many startups rely on incomplete software with many gaps, manageable UX, and occurring errors. But what if solving the problem is urgent? This is especially the case in business-to-business (B2B) operations. Since the product is used within a business process relevant to the other company, functionality is critical and an MVP is often not sufficient. Let's take a concrete example where we rent out a meeting room externally. The underlying resource management does not allow mistakes, as this could lead to double bookings. Even more critical can be the automated invoicing and payment processing by anny, where any mistake could mean financial losses or extra work for business customers. With anny, we have employed agile development methods while maintaining stability, security, user-friendliness, and scalability of the product, allowing customers to rely on the solution to their problem from the outset. Nowadays, over 10,000 bookings are processed daily with an automatically scaling infrastructure as the backbone of the anny-platform.

About anny

The cloud-based platform from anny digitizes and simplifies booking, capacity, and resource management. Anny can be used across industries and configured individually for every requirement. With anny, we aim for an overarching marketplace for shared resources, revolutionizing booking rooms, services, equipment, and more. Founded in April 2020, HQ: Aachen, 20+ employees, 1000+ satisfied customers, 1.5 million bookings after one year of operation

Empowering the world to share resources

Anny ist auf der Bewertungsplattform OMR Reviews für das Q2 2025 in der Kategorie Workplace Management Top Rated

anny ist Fall 2025 Europa High Performer bei G2

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