A bootstrapper's primary goal is to survive another year and will do anything to survive, including accept any investment offered. Beggars do not turn down money. In a way, "bootstrapper" is a euphamism for "can't raise yet". (I initially wrote "unable to raise", but that's an unfair frame, because raising is 98% networking and has very little to do with "ability". Capital flows through trust networks.)
This is an odd view as a bootstrapped founder because i simply never needed funding apart from a small amount for business registration and initial hardware purchases but that's 1000's. I was working another job while bootstrapping so wasn't going to starve no matter what. We ended up with a product clients were knocking on the door for (remote telemetry for railways/mines/environmental monitoring). The business has huge recurring revenue to this day and we decided to talk to VCs after making it. They had nothing to offer us and the amount they were willing to give made no sense and was in the realm of giving them money (imagine valueing a company at half of its annual earnings).
I'm very very negative on VC to this day except if you have a capital+time intensive barrier to break (most companies don't have this). 'You can't do it without our guidance' they'll say but the honest truth is they don't have much to offer apart from the money. VCs are not altruistic. They do the maths and figure out how to get returns regardless of how it will impact your stake. You'd be an absolute fool to take VC money without asking if it's actually a long term positive for you. There's always a better deal and giving them a significant share of your company on extremely generous terms for the promise of 'guidance' is going to be foolish IMHO. Bootstrapping is not some desperate scramble for money. The whole idea is to run the first phase off a shoestring so it has no real risks (apart from your own time and effort).
In what decade was this? Stories like this seem super rare from where I'm standing - boots on ground in 2024. I meet maybe two dozen founders per year - can't think of a single actual bootstrapper who doesn't feel like they need capital to compete. (There's something wrong with the economy right now ...)
My current company is self funded. We turned down term sheets in jan/feb 2023 because we didn't like the valuations offered, and just changed our plan instead.
30 years ago pretty much every startup was still sui generis on pretty much every dimension. The saas boom let to an absurd convergence on business models from funding to marketing, so what kinds of products are made. And lots of people who started companies just to make money (nothing wrong with that I suppose...except aren't there easier ways?) rather than starting them primarily to scratch an itch. So a lot of "is there a cargo cult I can follow?" rather than "hmm, what do I really need to do to get to my goal?"
It was ~20 years ago but i don't think the year matters as much as the luck of having an opportunity to step into (easily bootstrap-able) vs needing to force an opportunity (VC funding required). I think there are still opportunities out there for the former regardless of the year. I don't know them or I'd take them but I'm sure there's someone out there "if i could just get software to do X, we could sell Y".
My own story: I knew people working in telecommunications who couldn't sell satellite terminals because the customer needed more than just a naked satellite modem and data plan. I met the first customer sent my way, charged appropriately and got them a solution. Think solar panels, battery, small embedded SOC, a database to write to and a frontend website to access the data. Surprisingly that only took a couple of weeks to get a prototype together (yay for startup agility and my own hacker knowledge!) and the Telco sold a lot of satellite terminals from that and they realized it was a good idea to send more customers in a similar predicament my way. Eventually it spun up from there and we bought the original small time Telco that was referring us (software pays!) so we could gain the monthly recurring subscription we generated on top of the software consulting costs. We're now one of the main people to go to for this sort of thing.
I think there's still these sorts of opportunities out there today. If you're thinking the way to do a startup is to force a new market using VC funding there's other opportunities just sitting there that can spin up more organically. In fact the bootstrap-able opportunities are probably more likely to succeed imho since they tend to spin up from an existing need while the "Uber for X" type of VC funding try to force a market to exist where none has before.
Rubbish. We started Cygnus as a bootstrap and were continuously profitable and reached over 160 people before considering taking outside money to change the growth curve.
Your understanding of the term "bootstrapped" is warped by the environment you are operating in.
The traditional understanding is "building a business without taking on dilutive funding". This has always been hard, but in many ways it's easier now than before.
