The point that caught my eye is the "ramen profitable" one. We are at this point now, the amount is quite bigger, but we are 2 founders in their 30's with children so this is a lot of ramen. Also the wifes appreciate variety so "ramen profitable" for us is more like 10K/month. Our problem with financing now with this is that to built those revenue we had to sacrifice much of our vision and just concentrate on execution. Now we have a startup that needs about 4 days of work a month and generate some money. But it is not a sexy company. All the answer to basic VC questions for it are bad or not good enough. Like no barriers to entry, the competition is huge, etc...

So we could go back to the vision project and start that "great idea" we had, but instead we often find ourselves trying to make the current product generate more revenues.

I think that may be responsible with the problem PG sees with bootstrapping. "The mere fact that bootstrapped startups tend to be famous on that account should set off alarm bells." I think there are a lot of successful bootstrapped startup that are just not successful enough to be famous in any way. Ours is heading that way.