You've probably never heard of Crowdmark, but if you're a university student in North America, you've almost certainly used it. This bootstrapped Canadian startup processes nearly 1 million monthly visits for grading and assessment, making it one of the most widely-used yet invisible platforms in higher education.

"Crowdmark isn't building a product for students—it's building infrastructure for institutions, and that distinction explains everything about their explosive, quiet growth."

The tech stack is telling: AWS CloudFront and HSTS. No flashy frameworks, no complex integrations—just reliable, scalable infrastructure. This is a company focused on uptime and speed, not feature bloat. The 'Site Unavailable' page title suggests they might be between deployments or experiencing an outage, which for a grading platform is the cardinal sin. Yet their traffic remains robust, indicating user tolerance built on institutional relationships, not flawless UX.

• Bootstrapped efficiency: $1.5M revenue with 18 employees = $83K revenue per employee
• Institutional lock-in: 82.4% of traffic from undefined regions (likely North America) shows geographic dominance
• Zero marketing spend: 65% direct traffic proves product-led growth in education isn't a myth
• Network effects: Each professor adoption creates hundreds of student users