Hi Neil - yes definitely I did - and in fact that experience is tied into many of my answers here today about how one thing leads to a different set of decisions - about people, hiring, culture and choices.
So for example, it’s not an accident that we have built a small company, that’s profitable with a highly motivated team, which does big things but is not (yet) taking over the world.
It’s because we want to stay in control and make good, elemental decisions about the foundations of what we are building - a degree off at the start is a huge degree off 100x the scale.
So we are very product-led and customer centric. It’s people intensive, but we manage it well - YCBM has near on 18,000 customers - and many thousands more on the free plan. We have a full time customer success / support team of 5 (3 in US 2 in Europe). Our team is first class and actually won an award recently from NiceReply, Most people get their queries answered within 2-3 hours. We’ve also just been included in G2 Crowd’s top 100 software companies for 2020 which feels incredible to me. But it’s based on all of our customer feedback and the work that we’ve done.
So I do think that it’s possible to build brick by brick - assuming your product will allow you to scale (online scheduling clearly does have a huge addressable market).
I did a podcast with Alex Theuma a few years back where I talked about the way to look at such a decision and when you might want to take VC:
I think it comes down to whether your interests and theirs are truly aligned, so their money is working for you, not the other way around!
I recommend you read Founder’s Dilemma which talks about this - whether you want to be ‘rich’ (which is often correlated with VC-backed companies) or ‘king’ which is where founders keep control
and that can often be a very personal choice.
good luck - let us know how you get on!