Appreciate your thoughts here Dave, agree with what you say. A quick point of clarification on my situation (author of the post), I didn't take a failing bootstrapped company and get it funding. I stepped away entirely from the bootstrapped work I was doing, for personal reasons (to focus on things other than working all the time), and then an entirely separate opportunity came up to start a startup with funding, which I took because of the autonomy (mostly self-directed work), mastery (learning a tonne in a role I've never done before, alongside super smart people) and purpose (creating a company culture that isn't "crush it" startup bro style + attempting to help the news industry adjust to today's culture).
Hope that makes sense, just wanted to clarify that.
I would say you gain different* experiences, not necessarily more valuable. It depends on your circumstances and your goals. Hopefully my perspective on that came through in the post.
You're right on the 10x being low asprouse, I probably shouldn't have included that.
Agree Tiny Seed looks interesting, I actually recommended someone that earlier this afternoon. Great to see new takes on funding businesses and I'm excited to see what it can unlock for those who need a little boost but don't want to chase the unicorn.
Lost and founder is already on my Audible wishlist, expect to get to it in the next month after finishing Scott Belsky's Messy Middle.[0]
Hey [redacted], thanks for the thoughtful comments here.
> One thing that is undeniable is that a bootstrap will always leave you in control at the end of the day.
I agree bootstrapping gives you more say over which way you take the business, and hopefully that came across in my post (although I only mentioned it briefly).
> I think a product should not be made for the potential profit it could amass but to fill a need for these users, listening to them feels like the next logical step to take (and most companies, even tremendously giant ones, still fail to do this I feel like).
I agree we should be motivated by more than money. As I mention in the post, money is a bad master but a great servant. We need money to serve us, so we can feed our families and keep the lights on, but money itself shouldn't be the goal. I realise when taking funding this confuses the matter, as now you're not just responsible for your family, but for providing a return to your investors. I still believe it's possible to be mission-driven having taken funding, but understand it can complicate the matter.
> Even more important than that is that it might not be the next unicorn, but that is absolutely fine for some people. They just want enough to feed themselves and their families while having a sane work life/rhythm of say 4-5 hours a day once you get it rolling.
I agree the end goal for us is often spending time with those we love, whilst having that sense of purpose I mentioned in the post. We all want to leave some impact on the world, maybe that's a partner or children who know we loved them, maybe it's a few hundred paying customers who love your product, maybe it's some big swing towards a big dent in the world.
My co-founder and I are relatively counter-cultural in the startup world, admittedly it's early days, but we don't work crazy hours as our belief is that the long hours are often busy work, not important work. If we can look after ourselves, not get burnt out, make wise decisions from a place of rest and do important deep work regularly, we believe we can outcompete any startup bro culture that works 80+ hour weeks.
> I feel like the author used to somewhat adhere to this moto but somewhere along the way got lost and is now simply after the money for the sake of it.
I don't believe that's the case, personally. My current wage is half that of 2 other contracting roles I was offered at the same time as this gig. I'm fully aware the vast majority of startups fail, so I'll very likely be out of pocket. I took the role as I admire my co-founder and wanted to learn from his product skills, an area I realised I needed to grow in.
Before taking this role I used to work a full-time job, come home in the evenings and work on my side-hustle. For 3 years it meant I didn't really have a life outside of the day job and the side hustle. Now I normally work 8-4, home by 5 and have the evening to meet friends or relax. People often think taking funding means having less work/life balance, right now for me it's the opposite (again, caveat we're early days).
It gets messy. As are all startups to one extent or another. You ride out the highs and lows and keep moving forwards. I wasn't trying to say that going the VC route is necessarily easier or better (I hope I made that clear), just that there are different upsides and downsides to each, one isn't objectively better than the other.
> When you take VC, you've just hired yourself a board full of bosses.
Agree taking funding brings back an element of having a boss again Alan. It's certainly a trade-off of the VC route, and one of the main reasons I haven't taken funding before.
That said, I still think you get a good amount of autonomy by (co-)founding a startup, as you're often free to execute how you choose, but with the agreement that you'll pursue a path that can give an outsized return for your investors. Investors rarely want to dictate what and how you do things, in my experience.
> When does that ever stop being true?
Again I agree it doesn't, but it's something many bootstrappers don't quite understand when starting out (I didn't way back when), and I think is a point worth noting.
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Happy to make edits if there's ways I can clarify this better. Gotta ship something before EOP today but will revisit the article tonight.
That specific point was that people often start a business because they want the freedom of not having a boss, but in many ways you always have someone you're serving, be it a boss or a customer.
The wider point was: both bootstrapping and VC funding are good options, depending on your specific circumstances and goals at the time. One isn't objectively better than the other.
> significantly less interested in the what and how
I'm a long way from the West Coast so correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've always had the impression that they are very interested in the who even if not so much in the what and how. Stories of founders of profitable businesses being replaced for less-than-hyper growth abound.
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Even as a coder I'm contemplating whether going the no code route for MVP'ing new projects. These days we can create fully functional prototypes without touching code and I'd bet in quite a bit less time.
Ben's the best guy on the internet for teaching how to do this stuff, so if I do go this route I know who I'll be looking to learn from.
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It's a Form Builder tool that also offers a list of integrations, and is built with developers in mind.
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Hope that makes sense, just wanted to clarify that.