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Yep....

Bootstrapping is for fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company. The issues with bootstrapping:

1) No one to tell you to give up except your own survival instinct. 2) You've already told yourself to ignore that survival instinct because of the success stories you've heard. 3) Even if your idea is fantastic, there is another group of folks out there who have raised enough money to pay themselves working on the same thing. You are now under-resourced and already losing.

I about 90% regret bootstrapping my first, failed startup. The other 10% I managed to make into a great opportunity to learn a lot and expand my network but I suppose I could have done that much more cheaply.

Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company.

That definitely isn't true. Tens of thousands of companies are bootstrapped every year. Some go on to be quite successful (Github, GoPro, Apple...).

You won't find all that many bootstrapped business founders posting on HN (it's run by an investment company...) but that doesn't mean they're not out there. Plus, due to the changing landscape of VC investing, most deals require a bit of traction before you even get a Series A. You have to bootstrap before many VCs will talk to you. There's also angel money, family and friends, etc, but getting that while you're pre-revenue is still much harder than proving the business is at least a bit viable first.

Aren’t all those examples “day X profitable” startups? As in startups that had a profitable business model from day 1 and it only took them some share of the market to become profitable after an initial loss (usually operational). GitHub was making money in their very first year.

Many startups these days follow the “never profitable” business model in the hopes of being bailed out by angel investors or IPO.

I’d say it’s definitely possible to bootstrap when your profit grows along with your business. Not possible when you burn money every single day forever.

Was GitHub ever profitable?

Take those assumptions and spend a year burning your savings. Once you see that all your competitors raised at least a few hundred k pre-product while you’ve got a hole burning in your pocket, you’ll feel like an idiot.

If you run an already profitable business like a services company, you can get away with bootstrapping. But then it’s not really bootstrapping, it’s a pivot.

We've been bootstrapping our weird tech/bio/techbio startup for the last four years... it's NOT EASY at all, but we've made it to the point that we're ramen profitable (For now) and it's kind of an amazing feeling.

Of course I'm making like 1/5 I would at a tech company, but we're literally saving people's lives, and that really makes up for not making as much.

Kudos to you! In that time did you ever feel that you were being unfairly compared to certain unicorn startups as you were becoming profitable?

How does the reach of FAANG and their financial clout make it difficult when you're hiring devs?

You may not want to hear this but four years is way too long to reach ramen profitability and it’s not a good signal for future success of that startup.

Could you please state a source or elaborate your reasoning? That is a very bold claim, especially since biotech in particular has quite high costs. Note also that the objectives may be different (e.g. save more lives, versus maximize profits early).

That's the thing with business advice. You can give advice with good intentions but there is almost certainly someone out there who took the opposite of said advice and became successful.

Bootstrap or don't bootstrap. You can be successful either way but it's the nuances, timing, context, chance, etc. that matter.

I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that the large majority of successful businesses are either bootstrapped or use traditional loans as funding. The stats don't work out any other way - several hundred thousand new businesses are started in the US each year, but only a fraction that number could possibly be angel or VC funded. Your perspective only applies to a narrow slice of SaaS businesses.

I suppose when I read Hacker News, I think about the kind of companies that would apply to YC or otherwise compete with SV-ish funded companies.

Yes - if you can raise money then do it. Why not? But do not gave up if you cannot.

> Bootstrapping is fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company

This conflates people who haven't raised external funding and people who actively put money into a startup. It is possible to bootstrap a startup without plowing money into the business.

It's true that bootstrapped founders are plowing time into their business, but this is true of funded founders as well. VC money may pay a handsome salary, but taking it often means that you have to vest shares that you would otherwise own outright.

> A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.

If "fresh" really means caught on the day before, I would use this service. The "fresh" salmon in supermarkets is usually several days old.

Nope, this was from the same supplier as used by the supermarket. In fairness to them it might have been one day fresher than the stuff you get in the shop alright.

But they sell wild caught salmon and grocery stores sell farmed salmon.There is a significant difference in quality. In fact most farmed salmon are dyed red to more closely resemble wild salmon

A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.

There's a few online fish companies here in the UK. They're doing well. It might be easier because British people are slightly obsessed with Scottish salmon, and the country is much smaller which makes overnight delivery simpler.

Those crazy ideas are crazy only when they fail.

And with great execution even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples.

Ideas have nothing to do with failures, marriage breakups etc. That's bad planning, no backup plan, etc.

Ideas, usually have a strong correlation with failure. Irrespective of the execution. Ideas are the base theory within which the execution revolves around. If the premise itself is wrong then no amount of execution would solve it. Think windows Phone OS, Google+ etc. They were pretty incredibly executed products. But never took off because the base premise that another new OS with new APIs and new everything would get developer attention, killed WPos. There was no space for a facebook clone, irrespective of the integration capabilities and good image quality and that killed G+.

Crazy ideas are crazy because even great execution wouldn't be able to save it. ideas and execution need to be complimentary. Saying ideas don't matter is just as wrong as saying executions don't matter.

> even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples.

There are multiple orders of magnitude more examples of crazy ideas simply failing (multipl times, as there's only so many crazy ideas but an infinite amount of people thinking they are the first to come across it) than there are of crazy ideas succeeding.

Nonsense, a bad foundational idea sets a start-up back so much that it makes a failure so much more likely. Most don't have the runway to pivot away to something that works.

And if you think that businesses failing are some abstract concept completely removed from any personal impact then it shows why these success stories are a problem.

It's less prevalent and more unwelcome to hear about the marriages breaking up, the homes having to be sold, and the mental issues brought about through the businesses failing. It happens though. And the survivor bias that's reinforced through success stories is a contributing factor.

I always wondered how these kinds of ideas even survived the initial laugh-test. Like, didn't the entrepreneur even have a single friend who could point out how awful and flawed their idea was before they tried to make a serious business out of it?

People used to come to me to validate their horrible business ideas. "Oh, you're a tech guy and you have a business degree! What do you think of my Online Store For Cats idea?" Usually they didn't like what I had to say, and eventually people stopped coming to me for advice. Now I know why these things don't get filtered early. Entrepreneurs tend to be positive and optimistic, and then only surround themselves with other positive, optimistic people. So, now subscription-based juice squeezers make it all the way to production and then people scratch their heads and wonder when they fail.

>Entrepreneurs tend to be positive and optimistic, and then only surround themselves with other positive, optimistic people.

I wonder how to navigate this. Quite frankly, I would not be interested in startups at all if I listened to the negative people in my life (who say to get a stable job, don't take risks). But I also don't really want to fool myself into believing a fundamentally flawed idea would be viable.

Maybe part of the difference is not pivoting...

I don't see why Salmon is a crazy idea - they should be selling other seafood as well - it seems like a quite normal business.

who the hell buys a salmon everyday?

Agreed. That's how restaurants get their seafood and there are tons of seafood delivery companies! Maybe the flaw was this was b2c salmon delivery instead of b2b! ;)

> - A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.

Please take my money, where can I sign for this?

"Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories."

And due to the law of averages one of them will get lucky and be hugely successful from it... then the cycle repeats.

Dont they say you do not invest in the idea but in the team (and hope the succesful pivot makes you rich)?

>- A health start-up targeting a condition that affects 1 in 100k people, usually quite mildly and benignly, but involves surgically implanting a device onto a nerve in the jaw.

What's the condition? Seems like a serious intervention for a mild condition?

The first two ideas are pretty cool, but you cannot start charging people money. You need to use the ol' reliable "deploying an app with ads that can be removed after paying some money", at least at start.

That isn’t exactly reliable. You still need to get massive traction