CNCCookbook is my 7th startup, 5 reached a conclusion with 2 major acquisitions and 1 IPO while 2 are still in motion, including my CNCCookbook bootstrap. I’ve raised a lot of VC along that way and I have also talked to a lot of successful bootstrappers. Check out the history of companies like Craigslist, SmugMug, or 37Signals at various points in time and revenue. You will see the numbers I have given are achievable and I’m not the only one who says they are higher likelihood than a VC deal–37Signals and many others are on the same boat. Heck, many VC’s I talk to are on the same page. They’re very clear about telling entrepreneurs that not every deal should be a VC deal. Remember too that the Inc 5000 doesn’t even have all the data. Plenty of businesses don’t participate and their records are private.

If you want to get to exceptional results like $500K per employee, or even $200K, you will have to do exceptional work and you will need a strategy to make winning easier because you don’t have the dollars or manpower to just brute force your way there.

Here’s some food for thought:

I see you saying your new company, MixRank, has 3600 trials after raising your $1.5M and you have a page full of smiling faces on your About page–lots of employees already. I’m just now moving beyond the “doing amazingly well” $200K per employee stage, and according to SEMRush my organic search traffic is nearly 10x what MixRank gets. Using content marketing and organic search rather than advertising is just one of things you’ll need to do to make a bootstrap efficient. I see you have published 35 articles to your blog in 2012. I have done 34 so far in 2012 on this Smoothspan blog alone. I do 4-5 a week on the CNCCookbook business site. On top of that I write the software, handle the ops and orders, do customer service, plan the strategy, yada yada. BTW, I had a full time job up until June, I’ve taken 2 vacations so far this year, I have a family, and still got all that done.

Is it just a matter of cranking out a lot of blog posts? Heck no! I spent a lot of time developing some very analytical digital marketing strategies that facilitate and optimize the content marketing.

Eventually, I will tell the whole story about everything I did to get the company built, but I want to take it to 7 figures in revenue first. The biggest thing I can tell you is that if 1 person can do everything I have done so far, the model is scalable and they can get to $500K in revenue per employee. Meanwhile, you’ll see dribs and drabs of the story along the way and I’ll keep an eye on MixRank to see what I can learn from you.

There is virtually no business model on earth that can support a company with 10 employees doing $6 million a year in revenue. Any business that can scale and maintain $200K revenue per employee is doing amazingly well…$500K revenue per employee at the early stage and doubling every year would be unprecedented.

This post is based on faulty assumptions.