How a bootstrapped company grows into success, generating more than 3.4 million ARR

Canny was founded by Sarah Hum and Andrew Rasmussen back in 2015, when Sarah and Andrew decided to quit from Meta and become digital nomads. After 10 years later, Canny has grown into a product that generates more than 3.4 million ARR. And Canny is a fully bootstrapped company, no VC Funding. I’m gonna share all the details and secrets of How Canny.io grows into a successful bootstrapped SaaS company.

Early Story of Canny.io

Sarah was a product manager in Messenger Team of Meta, and Andrew was a software engineer at Meta. He contributed to the development of the "React Native" framework, which is one of the most popular web frameworks, used by millions of developers all around the world. They met at Meta and shared the same vision of building a startup. They quit and started their new journey; that's how Canny was founded.

Canny.io isn't what it was from the beginning. It has a different early prototype. Before canny.io became canny.io, Sarah and Andrew built a community for product feedback called "Product Pains", where users can post feedback and votes for different kinds of products on that platform.

Unfortunately, this product failed to achieve long-term user retention. And it didn't go viral, of course.

But during this time, they found an interesting fact that some product teams started to collect user feedback using Product Pains, and they even asked for the feedback feature in Product Pains. Which is very similar to how Product Hunt works these days. That inspired Sarah and Andrew that customers need a system to collect and manage feedback. Later, they built an embeddable feedback widget and offered it as a service at $19/month, which attracted the first 5 paying customers.

How They Got Early Paying User

They then focused on helping SaaS companies collect, organize, and prioritize user feedback more effectively. They launched canny.io in march 2017, that got them a lot of attention. The launch attracted thousands of visitors, 350+ trial signups, and dozens of paying customers, that launch got them a kickstarting early growth. They got 50 paying customers in less than 2 months.

The important pivot of Canny

2017

• 2017 Launch MVP: Feature Voting Board

• 2017 Improve Data Quality by requiring login first Back to the time of 2017, you could publish vote and feedback anonymously on canny.

  • Canny.io underwent a significant transformation by transitioning from allowing anonymous feedback to requiring user authentication for submitting feedback and voting. This change aimed to enhance the quality and reliability of the feedback collected.

  • They also add a public voting leaderboard, enabling teamsto identify and prioritize the most requested features based on user votes.

  This evolution shifted Canny from a simple feedback collection tool to a platform that facilitates consensus on feature prioritization.

2018

• Intercom & Slack integrations

  Shifted Canny from a standalone portal to a workflow-embedded tool; support and product teams could log votes without leaving chat.

  

• Public Roadmap

  Made feedback visible both before and after release, closing the “collect → ship → announce” loop and boosting trust + retention.Transparent “In Progress / Planned / Complete” columns showed customers you were listening.

2020

• Make Canny work better for big companies

2022

• Launch Free Plan, Turning Point of Business Model This big move make canny lose around half of their paying customers overnight but more than doubled their ARPU. That is a smart move and they double the price of growth plan.

  

2024

• AI has come!

  • Smart Replies & Comment Summaries

  • Autopilot: Automatically captures needs from customer service/sales conversations, deduplicates and merges feedback, filters spam, and enables feedback to truly "flow in and organize automatically" through discovery, extraction, deduplication, response, and summarization

The growth trajectory

• In 2017, Canny launched on Product Hunt in March, initially attracting 5 paying customers.

• Within two months of the launch, Canny grew to 50 paying customers.

• 2017: ARR reached $50,000.

• 2018: ARR grew to $200,000.

• 2019: ARR hit $750,000.

• September 2020: ARR reached $1 million with a team of 7.

• March 2021: ARR surpassed $1.4 million, and the team expanded to 9 people.

• November 2021: ARR exceeded $2 million, with over 1,000 paying customers.

• November 2022: ARR reached $3.5 million, with a 13-person team.

• November 2023: ARR slightly declined to $3.3 million, with a team of 16.

• March 2024: ARR recovered to $3.4 million, with a 17-person team.

• As of 2025, Canny remains a fully bootstrapped company, operating remotely with a team of around 23 people.

Canny.io showed us a great example of a small bootstrapped team build a product generating millions of revenue. Founders keep learning, they learned to market better, hire better, grow better and make better product.