I'm a fan of bootstrapping, but it's not always an option. Plenty of opportunities in consumer require a critical mass before you can start making money. These are the kinds of plays that make sense when VC is flowing more freely. For some businesses, it really does take 10 developers plus 5 others working for a year to hammer things out. That clocks in at $2-3 million, which just so happens to be a reasonable Series A.
This is absolutely true, different businesses have orders of magnitude capital requirements to get off the ground. However the big change in the last decade is how many more scalable businesses are possible to get off the ground with very little capital. If you want to take a shot at something big, more power to you, but if you're a first-time entrepreneur personally I'd recommend bootstrapping. That practical knowledge of how to find product-market fit, even on a small scale, is infinitely more valuable than all the big-time planning you can dream up.
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I'm a fan of bootstrapping, but it's not always an option. Plenty of opportunities in consumer require a critical mass before you can start making money. These are the kinds of plays that make sense when VC is flowing more freely. For some businesses, it really does take 10 developers plus 5 others working for a year to hammer things out. That clocks in at $2-3 million, which just so happens to be a reasonable Series A.
This is absolutely true, different businesses have orders of magnitude capital requirements to get off the ground. However the big change in the last decade is how many more scalable businesses are possible to get off the ground with very little capital. If you want to take a shot at something big, more power to you, but if you're a first-time entrepreneur personally I'd recommend bootstrapping. That practical knowledge of how to find product-market fit, even on a small scale, is infinitely more valuable than all the big-time planning you can dream up.