Hi there - my name is Matt Althauser and I’m a partner/founder at Polychrome. The funding that we brought to the company was $250,000 which we valued as the equivalent of the value of 3 years of development that the existing team had invested into building the initial open source project.
For us (polychrome) at the time, the money came directly from the bank accounts of myself and my two co-founders. It was pretty scary for us all!
In that sense; we do think of ourselves as bootstrapped. We (polychrome) did not (and still have not) take a dollar in compensation for the business. We’ve worked directly on the business for 3 years with the founders. I have been selling the software in Europe and my partner, Greg, in the US/Asia until we got revenue high enough to hire our head of sales, Mike and head of marketing, Anna. While doing this, we (Polychrome) paid ourselves by doing consulting for venture baked companies. Ben (Flagsmith CEO) was being paid by the business and his existing agency.
This is definitely not venture. FWIW - I have built two venture backed companies - Optimizely & Amplitude which took typical venture rounds and would not be bootstrapped IMO.
I've now worked at 3 different companies that built feature flags both internally and as a core part of their external product offering. I'm currently at Flagsmith (open source too).
Here are some of the more popular front-end feature flag use cases:
1. Gradual Roll Out: Build a feature and release it to 5% of your users, then increase as you see that it isn't "breaking anything". You might even do this AFTER a successful A/B Test concludes.
2. Test in Production: Build a feature and release it to only your internal team (or QA Team) to see how it works in a real production setting.
3. Feature Gating: Managing access to specific features based on a targeting condition. I've seen people do this for BETA features with key customers pretty often.
Most common reason people don't use them:
1. They are concerned about feature flag creep. Managing them if they aren't deprecated can be a problem worth thinking through ahead of time.
2. They worry about giving access to important parts of their product in production. Thinking about your environment set-up and access control is smart.