Why we picked it This is the honest bootstrapper shutdown account with the actual numbers, not a tidy failure listicle. Draelos self-funded Cydoc for seven years and shows the math that finally made the call obvious: revenue only 30 dollars above hosting cost per doctor, 4,000 to 6,000 dollars per integration, roughly 11 years to break even per practice, 27,900 dollars total revenue in 2024, and four paying customers slipping away. It is a live example of what happens when you do not set a tripwire early: you keep building custom work at a loss for an imaginary contract until the unit economics leave you no choice.
Why I Shut Down My Bootstrapped Health AI Startup After 7 Years: A Founder's Postmortem
From Glass Box Medicine by Dr. Rachel Draelos (founder and CEO, Cydoc) ~30 min read
- Do the break-even math early and literally: when revenue sits barely above your cost to serve and payback runs into years per customer, no amount of effort fixes the model.
- Watch retention, not just the logo count: four paying customers meant nothing once workflow friction was pushing them out the door.
- Chasing one imaginary large contract with months of unpaid custom work is a classic self-funded trap that a preset kill line would have caught.