Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Logik via 37signals Posted By Andy Wilson on June 10, 2010
We were featured in 37signals’ Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud series this week. Here is a piece of the story…
From http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2385-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-logik
This is part of our series “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” which profiles companies that 1) have $1MM+ in revenues, 2) didn’t take VC, and 3) are profitable.
Q&A with Andy Wilson of Logik
What does your business do?
Logik helps companies find, organize, process, and make searchable terabytes of digital documents for legal discovery. I always say we sell digital aspirin to attorneys experiencing discovery migraines.
How successful is your business?
Financially, we’ve been very successful considering our size relative to the competition (most have close to or well over 100 employees, we have 16). We don’t reveal internal financials now, because 1. we are private and 2. we don’t want VC’s beating down our door anymore after what happened with the 2009 Inc 500 ranking.
With that said, from 2005 to 2008 we grew revenue by 1,067% from $373,866 in 2005 to $4.4 million in 2008 with about $3 million in profit. We did that with 8 employees, a ton of servers, niche software, and 1 dog. This, minus the profit, is all public information now. We were ranked #181 overall on the 2009 Inc 500 survey and #1 for eDiscovery companies.
Getting on the Inc 500 was a great marketing tool for us, because it helped some of our more skeptical, on the fence, customers realize we were indeed legit despite our small size. Although we don’t reveal financials anymore, we have doubled our company size, moved to a new, bigger, and more open office space closer to our customers, and we are hiring for more engineers and support staff.
How did you get started?
In 2004 Sheng and I met for some quality Chinese food in Virginia to discuss what would become Logik. Prior to Logik, we were working for a small legal printing company helping to destroy rain forests. No seriously, we would print hundreds of thousands of emails to paper, so that massive legal teams could manually review each page. Very efficient (odd fact: I worked on the Microsoft antitrust litigation and at one point was printing out Bill Gates’ email for a few weeks. He is very long winded.) After a few years of doing this and inhaling enough toner to paint your entire house black a few times over I decided I needed out and to find a better way to solve this problem. I mean, why would you “print” electronic documents to paper? Why not just print them to PDF or TIF? Ah-ha!
So, after letting the Chinese food settle we got to work drawing out the process flow for our document processing software. We quit our jobs, cut back on expenses, leased some servers, and got to work. I have a CS background, but Sheng is the real engineer and created the first version in just a few months. We got our first real customer 9 months after we started. This is how we got started.
Logik founders Sheng Yang and Andy Wilson.
How did you fund yourself at first?
Savings and credit cards. Our total startup costs were less than $20,000. Funny enough, we are still funding ourselves in the same way, but with a lot more savings and less credit card debt.
Did you ever consider taking on any investors?
Yes. We created a presentation, met with a dozen or so well-known investors, and then decided to scrap the idea all together. We realized that it didn’t make any sense to give up the control of our company for money. We couldn’t even figure out what we would spend the money on if we got more of it. So, we decided that, for us and for our culture, it would be best to keep growing organically. It was probably the best decision we’ve made yet.
To read the rest of the story on 37signals.com Click Here
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