You can send free money straight to my bank account at regular intervals and I could write all about my incredible journey; an inspiring story of struggle against all odds.
...The odds of not being able to afford a yacht within 5 years.
This is an economy of scale. It's caused by your competitors' capitalization, and it may be unsustainable since it's with respect to customer-acquisition versus production.
If your competitors' unit economics work, they're strategically leveraging scale using capital. Not the other way. (If they don't, go into cockroach mode or sell to them.)
Just trying to understand the context here: your competitors apply/get-approved before you do, or is it that you don't want to take the funding? (or something else going on).
Because we're run super lean, we've been able to hire more and spend more on marketing during these tough times while businesses are downsizing or putting a halt on hiring/marketing dollars.
If the space you're getting into requires lots of capital, fundraising is unavoidable, but if you're thinking of even bootstrapping a company, it better be one that won't require a lot of capital (SaaS), and you need to run it lean.
You wouldn’t be able to bootstrap Uber or AirBNB, because the markets they’re selling into are huge. However, there is an abundance of <10Bn-sized markets/industries out there that a VC wouldn’t think to invest in, where bootstrapped companies with a tech focus can grow and take over.
You know that someone else is going to get that funding, but it's not going to be you. It's more likely to help your competitor than it is to help you (the reader of the article). This is bad news for the typical reader of this article.