The Lessons Behind a Decade of Self-Funded Growth

Most founder stories get told through fundraising, where they mention the round that changed everything or the investor who believed in them. After successful rounds, the company becomes a unicorn and enriches everyone involved in a short time.

But I don't have that story, as none of my current projects took a dollar of outside money. Every product and every mistake was paid out of what the business made. That kind of setup changes things, so in this article, I wanted to share lessons and mistakes that we had along the way, so that new founders don’t step on a rake.

Where this started

It's hard to say exactly when we began, but I think it was somewhere between 2013 and late 2014. Our company started because one person asked to build a personal cabinet after buying MetaTrader. And that, surprisingly, turned into our first product in 2014. 

That was not an immediate success. At our first expo, we did not even have a stand. So we bought visitor tickets instead of service-provider ones, and security followed us around the whole time because we were handing out booklets we technically were not allowed to hand out. Long story short, we were learning the rules by getting caught breaking them. And now, for 10 consecutive years, we have not missed a conference.

One decision that helped us reach more was aiming to have it global, for sure. Aiming for the stars has brought the company further than staying small and comfortable ever would have. Who knows, maybe this was one of the most important lessons for the business. 

Poor choices are unavoidable

But that size of ambition came with the same size of mistakes, and from my experience, the biggest one was hiring. Early on, it was hard to tell a senior engineer from a junior one. Juniors were disguising themselves as seniors, so choosing the right one was not always efficient. 

There was also the fear of making expensive hires. When the company is self-funded, a high salary feels like a commitment, and the easier way is to say no and look for someone cheaper. But I realised that hiring less-experienced workers costs the company, so we changed the approach. If an engineer who costs thousands brings in millions, why not? 

Delegation was another failure, but it is not commonly discussed as a business mistake. For the first five or six years, my workday ran around fourteen hours, with hands in nearly everything. Then, it became clear that delegation and more independence for the team can bring better results. 

There is research showing that 79% of autonomous workers are highly engaged and tend to leave companies much later. That was exactly the case, so founders had better stop having a hand in everything they could. 

The other issue was similar, and it was trying to build everything at once. Our original idea was an ecosystem, but what got underestimated was how every product pulls a massive amount of resources. People were splitting time across two or three products simultaneously, and none of them got the focus it needed.

Staying close to the product, does it help?

The same instinct to hold everything close reached the top of the company, as a result. A few years ago, I completely rebuilt it, so that I became the CTO myself. Now, our technical expertise is much more advanced, and we have automated many processes, which increases control over engineers and frees them from routine tasks.

However, I would not recommend that every founder occupy a C-level role in their company, especially if you plan to seriously scale. Yes, staying close to the technical side mattered during transitions, but that closeness can eventually become a bottleneck. 

Once a company is large enough, the founder should not be the one who approves every process. When it’s the opposite, it becomes close to micromanagement and the lack of delegation we discussed above. So, it’s better to figure out which processes can be handed off entirely and which still need the founder in it.

What self-funding does to accountability

The upside of no outside money is having nobody else to answer to and no investor clock pushing decisions you don't believe in. Self-funding also helps you get new results, since you don’t have to repeat someone else’s old methods.

In 2017, as crypto started getting built into the Forex infrastructure, the reaction from the market was that it was a scam that would pop. But I didn’t believe it. We expected at the time that exchanges would essentially become exchangers, with transactions moving toward USDT, and the system was built around that. 

It was a risky bet, but it did pay off. We became one of the first to accept USDT for our own services and liquidity. And it was a smart move competitors took three to four years to copy. 

But self-funding also narrows the tolerance for mistakes in a different way. Every poor choice is capital drawn directly from client revenue rather than someone else's funds. That's a heavier form of accountability than a board meeting, where you have to report to investors.

Anyway, I still do believe that success comes from trying new things, even when you make serious mistakes. If you take 10 steps and 7 are wrong, the 3 right ones cover the losses in the long run.