Hacker News Reader

That depends on what kind of business you want to start. I'm a fan of growing slow and not taking outside capital. It worked pretty well for me, and working with VC, not so much. But the fact that bootstrapping works for some products doesn't mean it works for all of them. In particular, a product with serious operating costs and high cost of user acquisition is hard to bootstrap.

It's one thing to sell products to, say, every freelance developer in the world. Freelance developers are (relatively speaking) wealthy and interested in products that improve their practices. Parents are not generally in an ambient state of seeking products to secure their kids Internet connections. That makes them hard to reach and sell to.

We did have a business model. Jason didn't talk about it much, but if you look at my original post and Brandon's more in depth post it's there.

Was it a billion dollar business? Probably not, unless we owned most of the space if not all the space. This was inconceivable when you looked at the players.

twitter, google & facebook might disagree

Twitter/Facebook grew virally, not through paid marketing to acquire users.