Absolutely - when me and my team spend $50k to experiment (which is chump change for a funded company) and it fails, that hurts. It's coming out of my pockets. And because of that, I remember it and my team remembers it.

But it's also allowed us to focus solely on the problems our customers actually have and will spend money for. It forces service/product-market fit before attempts to scale.

We are a services business so it is different than SaaS, but same principles apply.

There are benefits to bootstrap and benefits to funded. I feel as if bootstrapping first is a great way to learn the lessons needed to be successful when you do something funded later on.