Pregnancy didn’t stop this entrepreneur from bringing her media startup to $1M revenue

News of startups raising funds has become so common that a newbie to the scene might assume that it is a compulsory step on a fledgling company’s path to success. There is, however, another way that might seem old-school: to build a business that actually generates revenue. In other words, bootstrapping.

Today’s entrepreneurs tend to perceive bootstrapping as a slow, cumbersome, and unexciting route. “Get rich quickly” is the motto of the times, and the only way to do that is to bring in fat rounds of funding, achieve a billion-dollar valuation, and rake in the cash upon exiting. Right?

Tell that to Chris Edwards. Her online lifestyle publication Honeycombers recently hit US$1 million in revenue, and – lo and behold – it was and continues to be fully bootstrapped. “We don’t have any plans to fundraise,” she reveals. “We were contemplating it, but we have decided to keep re-investing and keep 100 percent ownership.”

Shattering norms

Edwards is defying all the stereotypes. For one, she started Honeycombers when she was 30 years old – an age that many would consider too old to be successful. Plus, she was pregnant. Instead of taking it easy, Edwards pushed ahead with the publication; she blames that on her “overly positive and enthusiastic” personality.

“Honestly, I love knowing what’s going on and I love writing and talking about the cool stuff happening in Singapore,” she explains. “It’s such a natural fit – it’s what I spend my whole time doing […] and I am a big fan of the lifestyle here in Singapore, so it was just a natural extension of what I love doing.”

This was back in 2009. “I felt that there was no publication in Singapore that spoke to me,” Edwards recalls. “There were local publications and expat publications, but I really didn’t see myself as either.”

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At that time, she also noticed that many young expatriates were not up to speed on what was going on in the city. “So there was a lot of complaining that Singapore was boring, but there was so much cool stuff going on, people just needed to be tapped into the local scene,” Edwards adds. The gap prompted her to create Honeycombers, a local publication that spoke to expats and locals alike.

Hyperlocal hype

Fast forward to today, and hyperlocal sites are a dime a dozen. Edwards believes, though, that Honeycombers has managed to find a sweet spot that edges out most of the surrounding competition: