Great article, Rachel, one that really strikes a cord with me, mainly because we are a bootstrap business too. We work hard to sustain ourselves through bespoke service work whilst developing our online products to eventually (and hopefully) generate predictable and sustained income. We work hard but we don’t kill ourselves doing it.

And that’s how it should be. I figure that there’s something wrong with a business model if you can’t achieve what you’re trying to do within a reasonable amount of hours per week. Yes, we have to work on weekends and evenings but it’s not like we’re sleeping under our desks and destroying our families and social lives in the process.

Personally, I think it boils down to two things: working smart rather than ‘hard’ and being modest in our ambition. We never went out and tried to find hundreds of thousands of pounds investment so we could hire lots of staff and kick back in big offices but then we don’t want to make billions like Zynga either. We want to enjoy our work, our lives, contribute to the web industry and run a great company. And part of that ethos is having a balance to our lives.