Bootstrapping is for fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company. The issues with bootstrapping:
1) No one to tell you to give up except your own survival instinct. 2) You've already told yourself to ignore that survival instinct because of the success stories you've heard. 3) Even if your idea is fantastic, there is another group of folks out there who have raised enough money to pay themselves working on the same thing. You are now under-resourced and already losing.
I about 90% regret bootstrapping my first, failed startup. The other 10% I managed to make into a great opportunity to learn a lot and expand my network but I suppose I could have done that much more cheaply.
That definitely isn't true. Tens of thousands of companies are bootstrapped every year. Some go on to be quite successful (Github, GoPro, Apple...).
You won't find all that many bootstrapped business founders posting on HN (it's run by an investment company...) but that doesn't mean they're not out there. Plus, due to the changing landscape of VC investing, most deals require a bit of traction before you even get a Series A. You have to bootstrap before many VCs will talk to you. There's also angel money, family and friends, etc, but getting that while you're pre-revenue is still much harder than proving the business is at least a bit viable first.
Many startups these days follow the “never profitable” business model in the hopes of being bailed out by angel investors or IPO.
I’d say it’s definitely possible to bootstrap when your profit grows along with your business. Not possible when you burn money every single day forever.
If you run an already profitable business like a services company, you can get away with bootstrapping. But then it’s not really bootstrapping, it’s a pivot.
Of course I'm making like 1/5 I would at a tech company, but we're literally saving people's lives, and that really makes up for not making as much.
How does the reach of FAANG and their financial clout make it difficult when you're hiring devs?
This conflates people who haven't raised external funding and people who actively put money into a startup. It is possible to bootstrap a startup without plowing money into the business.
It's true that bootstrapped founders are plowing time into their business, but this is true of funded founders as well. VC money may pay a handsome salary, but taking it often means that you have to vest shares that you would otherwise own outright.
Bootstrap or don't bootstrap. You can be successful either way but it's the nuances, timing, context, chance, etc. that matter.
If "fresh" really means caught on the day before, I would use this service. The "fresh" salmon in supermarkets is usually several days old.
There's a few online fish companies here in the UK. They're doing well. It might be easier because British people are slightly obsessed with Scottish salmon, and the country is much smaller which makes overnight delivery simpler.
And with great execution even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples.
Ideas have nothing to do with failures, marriage breakups etc. That's bad planning, no backup plan, etc.
And if you think that businesses failing are some abstract concept completely removed from any personal impact then it shows why these success stories are a problem.
It's less prevalent and more unwelcome to hear about the marriages breaking up, the homes having to be sold, and the mental issues brought about through the businesses failing. It happens though. And the survivor bias that's reinforced through success stories is a contributing factor.
People used to come to me to validate their horrible business ideas. "Oh, you're a tech guy and you have a business degree! What do you think of my Online Store For Cats idea?" Usually they didn't like what I had to say, and eventually people stopped coming to me for advice. Now I know why these things don't get filtered early. Entrepreneurs tend to be positive and optimistic, and then only surround themselves with other positive, optimistic people. So, now subscription-based juice squeezers make it all the way to production and then people scratch their heads and wonder when they fail.
I wonder how to navigate this. Quite frankly, I would not be interested in startups at all if I listened to the negative people in my life (who say to get a stable job, don't take risks). But I also don't really want to fool myself into believing a fundamentally flawed idea would be viable.
Crazy ideas are crazy because even great execution wouldn't be able to save it. ideas and execution need to be complimentary. Saying ideas don't matter is just as wrong as saying executions don't matter.
There are multiple orders of magnitude more examples of crazy ideas simply failing (multipl times, as there's only so many crazy ideas but an infinite amount of people thinking they are the first to come across it) than there are of crazy ideas succeeding.
Please take my money, where can I sign for this?
And due to the law of averages one of them will get lucky and be hugely successful from it... then the cycle repeats.
What's the condition? Seems like a serious intervention for a mild condition?
I've been guilty of not trying to talk sense to some of them, so much so that there's one particular marriage break-up related to a stupid tech start up blowing a couples life savings that still haunts me.
And for the record, here's some of the ideas that went down in flames...
- An application like a geo-fenced Wikipedia for Android devices, except without any content worth using and charging 5 bucks/month for it.
- A Flickr/Google maps mash up, again charging customers for a product that's executed much better, and free, elsewhere.
- A health start-up targeting a condition that affects 1 in 100k people, usually quite mildly and benignly, but involves surgically implanting a device onto a nerve in the jaw.
- A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.