Surviving the Early Years Without Salary

Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of ScaleGrid, left a decade-long engineering career at Microsoft to solve a painful database operations problem he had lived firsthand. After early missteps selling to enterprises, he shifted to helping developers manage MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres on the cloud, bootstrapping the business from scratch.

ScaleGrid grew steadily through product depth, technical support, and Dharshan's mastery of SEO—becoming the top organic result for many key searches. The company expanded into multiple database engines, added a distributed engineering team, and reached 20 employees by 2021, serving both SMB developers and some enterprise teams.

Dharshan sold a majority stake to Spotlight Equity Partners during the pandemic after receiving an unsolicited offer, later stepping out of day-to-day operations while remaining on the board.

In this conversation, Dharshan shares hard-earned lessons about product-led growth, support as strategy, SEO as a long-game advantage, and how bootstrapped founders can build meaningful outcomes in massive markets.

Key Takeaways

• SEO Power: SEO remains a long-term growth engine for bootstrappers because big VC-backed companies rarely have the patience to compound it.
• Support as Strategy: Deep, responsive technical support became ScaleGrid's differentiator and directly informed product innovation and content.
• Start at the Edges: Enterprises won't buy from a one-person startup, but edge users with urgent problems will — and they become your early beachhead.
• Bootstrap Constraints: Founder over-frugality can limit growth; strategic delegation and early team building prevent burnout and plateauing.

Quote from Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of ScaleGrid

"You can't take random people and make them an entrepreneur. You have to want to be an entrepreneur and want to be on your own. You have to enjoy the freedom and the risk and the upside that comes with it and the unmitigated downside as well. You have to accept and be comfortable with it.

"You want to be on your own so you can try things. You are constantly looking at problems and new solutions. You want to be around people who like that sort of process: Here's a new problem and here's a new solution.

"But the most important thing you have to do as an entrepreneur is you have to add value to your customers. And most people forget that."

Links

• Dharshan Rangegowda on LinkedIn
• ScaleGrid on LinkedIn
• ScaleGrid website
• Spotlight Equity Partners (acquirer)
• Allied Advisers (M&A advisor)
• AngelPad Accelerator

This podcast is sponsored by Designli, a digital product studio that helps entrepreneurs and startups turn their software ideas into reality. From strategy and design to full-scale development, Designli guides you through every step of building custom web and mobile apps. Learn more at designli.co/practical.

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