The largest problem developers have with bootstrapping a project is that they focus way too much on building vs solving a customer pain point. This leads to bloated MVPs and little feedback from customers.

Devs need to flip their focus. Instead, spend a lot of time with customers, build marketing landing pages, which include mockups of the software, and see if you can attract paying customers. Gather feedback early and often.

Once you're successful with that, you'll have a clearer path of what to build. Then go build it.

The magical part of this approach is that you'll have most of your sales and marketing pitch down by this point, so launching your project into a business will be so much easier and more likely to succeed.