you always work for someone, but you can have multiple clients so you're not at the mercy of one. Even if you save up some money you have to think of ways to make it work - be it in rentals or owning a factory - you just serve different groups of people then.

bootstrapped saas / apple ecosystem apps in niches i'm familiar with. mostly passive recurring revenue (most of my time spent goes into r&d, i chose architectures to minimize ongoing operational needs).

i bootstrapped to avoid "working for" investors. and on some projects where i'm working with others, we've formed anarchist coop-like structures to avoid hypocritically subjecting others to the hierarchies i escaped. we're all happier and more productive for it. i would like to help more people try this through repeatable playbook-like resources.