We celebrated appointmed’s 10-year anniversary last week. Fancy dinner with the team. Two days at a spa. It felt strange to mark the occasion because most days still feel like we’re just getting started.
But 10 years is long enough to prove something I wasn’t sure about in 2016: you can build a profitable, sustainable software company without venture capital. Not just survive. Thrive.
Seven figures in revenue. 3,500+ customers across the German speaking market. Team of eight people. Growing 35% year over year without adding headcount. 1% annual churn.
The 18 Months We Wasted
Early on, we did the thing you’re supposed to do. We pitched investors. Business angels. VCs. The top-tier firms and the bottom-feeders. Everyone.
We got ghosted by some of the hottest names in European tech. We got insulting offers like 75,000 euros for 35% of the company. We got advice to offer the product for free, build a user base, then figure out monetization later. That one was my favorite. Build something people need, give it away, then somehow convince them to pay for it after they’re used to getting it free. Brilliant.
We got a lot of “interesting idea, but…” followed by reasons why therapists wouldn’t pay for software or why the market was too small or why our team wasn’t the right fit.
The disrespect helped. Each rejection made us more determined to prove appointmed could be a fantastic business on our terms.
After 18 months of this, we stopped looking. Fuck it. We'd bootstrap.
Best decision we ever made. Had we taken outside money, I’m fairly certain appointmed wouldn’t exist today. Or it would be a company I wouldn’t want to work at.
The Freight Train Effect
Here’s what 10 years of runway actually bought us.
When you’re not operating on an 18-month VC clock, you can make different decisions. Slower decisions. Better decisions. You can wait for the right hire instead of panic-hiring because investors want to see headcount growth. You can fix technical debt that won’t show up in next quarter’s metrics. You can say no to features that would complicate the product even if some customers really want them.
By year four, we were sustainable. We didn’t need side projects anymore. Bernhard and I stopped walking that tightrope between making rent and keeping the company afloat, pouring every available euro into appointmed while trying to survive. We could finally just live off appointmed’s revenue. It felt like a huge freight train leaving the station. Slow at first. Almost painfully slow. But once it picked up speed, it became nearly unstoppable.
When friends and family ask how the business works, I tell them it’s like a kid building a mountain in a sandbox. One shovel at a time. Each new customer adds to the pile. With 1% churn, they stay. The mountain keeps growing.
That 1% churn rate is everything. It meant we weren’t constantly backfilling lost customers. Every new signup was actual growth. The subscriptions stacked. Month after month. Year after year. Compounding in a way that only works if you stick around long enough to see it happen.
VCs wouldn’t have had the patience for this. They would’ve pushed us to grow faster, spend more, hire aggressively. We would’ve collapsed under our own weight.
What Actually Got Harder
People assume scaling gets easier. More customers, more revenue, more resources. In some ways, that’s true. We can afford better tools now. We can spend on marketing. We can spoil our employees with bonuses, spa weekends, exclusive team events and trips for the entire team.
But other things got harder in ways I didn’t expect.
Customer support is the obvious one. As we grew past the early adopter phase, support became more transactional. More demanding. People expect enterprise-level service from our eight-person team. They don’t care that we’re bootstrapped. They paid for software and they want it to work perfectly, immediately. Failing to understand that we are a small team doing our best.
We still maintain a five-minute average response time. But it takes more effort now. More emotional labor.
The hardest thing, though, is team dynamics.
Over 10 years, life happens. People get married. Have kids. Burn out. Try other things. Lose focus on the company for a while, then come back. None of my cofounders ever completely left, but we had phases where we needed hard conversations about whether someone was still in it. Those conversations still happen. A lot less frequently, but they'll probably continue to exist.
When you’re eight people, one person checking out creates real problems. There’s nowhere to hide. No middle management layer to absorb the slack. If someone needs to step back, the rest of us have to pick up that work. We shift priorities. Redistribute workloads. Make it work.
Some moments felt like the team might fall apart. But we didn’t.
This is the part that doesn’t show up in revenue charts or growth metrics. Keeping everyone pulling the wagon when circumstances change. When priorities shift. When someone’s going through a rough patch in their life and can’t give 100% for a few months.
These problems don’t go away. They’re not bugs to fix. They’re features of building something over a decade with real humans who have real lives.
What Patience Actually Looks Like
We got to build appointmed the way we wanted. Slowly. Carefully. With room to make mistakes and learn from them. With space for people to have lives outside work.
Ten years sounds like a long time. In startup culture, it’s an eternity. Most VC-backed companies are dead or acquired by year five. The ones that survive are often shells of what they set out to be, contorted into shapes that fit investor expectations rather than customer needs.
We’re still here. Still profitable. Still growing. Still small enough that everyone on the team knows every customer’s pain points.
The investors who passed on us probably don’t think about appointmed anymore. Why would they? We’re not in TechCrunch. We didn’t exit for nine figures. We’re just a boring, profitable business serving therapists the best we can.
But that’s exactly the point.
Patience isn’t sexy. It doesn’t make for good headlines. It doesn’t give you that rocket ship feeling where everything moves fast and breaks often.
What it does give you is 10 years. Then 15. Then 30, if you want it.
And that freight train we started in 2016? It’s still picking up speed.
