If you are in Ireland then at some stage, usually once your initial product is approaching beta, you WILL need to get on a plane – a lot! However, the holy grail of building a global empire while bootstrapping from behind your desk is possible – yet super rare – and I can only think of a one Irish Tech company today that fits that bill.
Teamwork.com is based in Cork, has a team of 23 people (all engineers – no real sales or marketing resources) and will probably do €10M in revenue this year. Teamwork was founded by Daniel Mackey and Peter Coppinger and they have taken no outside funding. In my opinion, Teamwork has to be one of the most unrecognized/ unknown success stories in Irish Tech these days. The guys are heads down, super profitable, passionate about product development and giving the big boys a very serious run for their money. They are world class and need to be celebrated as the model of ‘bootstrapping’ success. A model that Ronan Perceval (another bootstrapped success, who only recently took investment after building a large company) talks about in his great medium post entitled ‘What Startups can learn from the Mittelstand‘
Yawn – how unsexy! They didn’t have any big funding announcements or win a place on a famous accelerator. How are they going to make VC’s rich? How are they going to scale? How will they get overseas customers? Hell, they barely even had a mention on TechCrunch.
I doubt they will ever make it – poor guys :)
Connor Murphy 
The sad reality is that for a lot of people they equate investment with success. Teamwork and other companies that haven’t done funding rounds don’t get spoken about as much and that’s a shame.
Hi Michele, I agree and a lot of it is down to the way the press around the industry works. Usually startups are featured when they win a pitching competition or secure investment. This then leads to a ‘virtuous cycle’ of more PR and more coverage. I can’t complain personally about that as we directly benefited from it, and in fairness to the tech media, investment is usually a positive signal that this startup has been ‘vetted’ by professional investors and has a ‘story’. The Tech Media are bombarded with 100’s of startups a week and I guess using investment is just an easy ‘filter’ for them. The good news is that more journalists are interested in covering ‘bootstrap’ success stories and one journalist i spoke with this week should be running a feature soon on European Bootstrapped companies we may not have heard of before.