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Comment by danjl | Hacker News Reader

While you're at it, stop looking for VCs and investment to pay your salary. Instead, build under revenue. Bootstrap. So many of the problems in startups happen because people want different things. If you don't have a co-founder, and you don't have investors, you can focus entirely on your customers and making revenue.

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Problem with this is that if you want to hire engineers it is near impossible to do with vc money. You could maybe bootstrap if you try hard but still will need cofounders or vc money to hire engineers to do something fast enough. If you are working full time on bootstrapping some idea, you are still missing out on your salary which is probably high if you are able to do something like this

> if you want to hire engineers it is near impossible to do with vc money

s/with/without?

Extremely controversial opinion, stop reading now to preserve your sanity: If you can’t afford engineers, you probably aren’t ready to hire engineers. If you can’t develop a product without a VC cash drip and a code monkey goon squad to get shit done for you, you probably aren’t ready to run a company.

Exactly.

seems like a dismissive attitude... engineer can cost 1M a year easily and that eliminates viability of lot of small ideas. It's no different than internet servers costing thousands and then suddenly innovation makes them cost less by many factors and creating a surge in new startups.

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