5 ways to bootstrap your startup

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/16/5-important-ways-to-successfully-bootstrap-your-venture/

by yoavush • 13 years ago

4 4 13 years ago

onion2k2• 13 years ago

Three of the points are joining an accelerator, taking out loans and crowd-funding. If you're raising capital through selling equity or taking on debt, you're not bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is doing it without external money, working on the side if necessary, until the business has revenue to pay you so you can do it full-time.

yoavush2• 13 years ago

taking loans/crowdfunding do not give away equity and are you trying to say that joining an accelerator means you can't consider yourself bootstrapping?

onion2k2• 13 years ago

Perhaps you're using a different definition of bootstrapping, but in my understanding it means "starting a business and getting to profitability without taking external money in the form of selling equity or taking on debt"[1]. Accelerators pretty much always take a small chunk of equity, and bank loans are debt (obviously). Crowd-funding in the Kickstarter sense, with "pre-order" sales of a thing, is bootstrapping, but crowd-funding in the seedrs sense with a crowd of people investing by-proxy isn't - it's just a fund raising in a different way.

5 ways to bootstrap your startup

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