From Bootstrapping To Global Scale: How Two Founders Built A Multimillion-Dollar Business Without External Funding

It's common for startups to turn to investors when seeking funds to grow their business, believing this is the only way to succeed. However, this financing can come at a high cost, such as giving up control over key decisions and losing touch with their core users, resulting in failed products and missed opportunities for long-term growth.

That's why Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem, founders of the popular Discord bot MEE6, chose a different path: building their business independently. Even without relying on outside investing, these two programmers turned their small project into a multimillion-dollar business. Today, MEE6 is used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide, proving that startups can thrive in today's market without sacrificing their independence.

Learn more about founders Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem's bootstrapping journey to creating MEE6 and how their platform is helping online communities around the globe.

Two Founders Raised on the Internet

Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem developed a passion for technology and coding from a young age.

Brendan released his first app at 12 and created a file-sharing website at 16. But he soon transitioned to a stint as a hacker, including breaking into the Silicon Valley Bank's website. This bold move invited him to multiple incubator programs and fostered a passion for tech entrepreneurship.

Anis showed similar promise early on. He began programming at 12 and launched over 20 websites during his teenage years, honing his skills through constant experimentation.

When their paths crossed, the two bonded over their shared experiences and began working on various projects, drawing inspiration from tech pioneers and their ability to work with limited resources. "Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook from his dorm, and Google started in a garage," says Anis. "That shows anyone who can code can build a global success — something we found incredibly inspiring."

While brainstorming ideas, the pair began reflecting on their time in online communities, noticing how most of those spaces were run by unpaid moderators who often struggled to balance server management with their daily lives. This is especially true for Discord, a platform built on user-maintained servers with over 200 million monthly active users. With that in mind, the pair began developing a tool to lighten the workload of the millions of moderators in this space — laying the foundation for MEE6.

Building a Business From the Ground Up

When Brendan and Anis started working on MEE6, they hesitated to rely on outside investors like venture capital firms, wary of how it could lead them to prioritise growth over product quality or user needs. "Many startups raise lots of money, overhire, and spend too much on paid user acquisition," Anis explains. "As a result, they lose focus on their users, leading to bloated teams and products that don't last."

Looking to avoid these common pitfalls and retain complete control over the creation process, the pair decided to develop MEE6 without any external financing—a strategy commonly known as bootstrapping. Although it's an uncommon tactic, it's proved successful for companies like MailChimp, GitHub, and Craigslist.

For this strategy to work, the pair first had to find ways to cut costs whenever possible. Their first move was to relocate to a remote countryside in France for six months to save money on rent and utilities. They relied on free trials from major cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to keep infrastructure costs low during the initial development stages.

Additionally, instead of building MEE6 all at once, Brendan and Anis developed it feature by feature, heavily testing and iterating each function before fully rolling it out. This saved them money on unnecessary server costs and ensured that core features could be properly scaled without any technical setbacks.

Thanks to these strategies, the two founders created a successful, user-centric tool that meets its users' needs—even though they were working on a minimal budget. "By staying lean, focused, and connected, we stayed on the right track, and our hard work paid off," Brendan reflects.

MEE6: An All-in-One Tool for Discord Communities

After years of lean, focused development, MEE6 officially launched in 2018 as an all-in-one Discord bot that simplifies the work of community managers. Built on the open-source platform Kubernetes, MEE6 automates essential server maintenance tasks, helping moderators manage their communities more efficiently.

The tool offers a wide range of features with a simple and intuitive interface. Server managers can create and send personalised greeting messages for new members, assign customised roles, set automatic alerts for activity on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, filter out spam messages, reward active users with a levelling system, take community polls, and record voice chats—among many other features.

Over the years, MEE6 has grown from a two-person operation into a global business with 45 employees. It's currently the most used Discord bot, installed in over 21 million servers and serving over 300 million users — far exceeding what Brendan and Anis imagined when they first started. Brendan says, "Choosing to bootstrap MEE6 wasn't easy, so knowing that something we built from scratch is helping so many people worldwide is incredibly rewarding."

Finding Success by Staying Independent

By cutting costs, listening to their users, and refining their product step by step, Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem were able to bootstrap their way to success. MEE6 has become a trusted tool for millions of communities, proving that forgoing traditional funding to prioritise users can lead to long-term growth.

For aspiring founders looking to grow organically and sustainably (without relying on external sources), Brendan and Anis's story exemplifies how you can leverage a healthy amount of creativity, determination, and careful planning and successfully build and scale a thriving business on your terms.