Excellent article about working with investors, but I'm not sure bootstrapping got a fair shake. 2 other ways to Bootstrap: 1) Getting a customer to pay up for

Excellent article about working with investors, but I'm not sure bootstrapping got a fair shake. 2 other ways to Bootstrap: 1) Getting a customer to pay up for a product up front. This is different from consulting, and this is not investment because you are not selling equity. 2) Building a niche product, with a market that is cheap to reach, and using cashflow to evolve product. Case 1, the pain is equal to the number of customers you have to talk to to find this one or more that will fund your development. Subtract pain if you have good or opportunistic connections; subtract pain if you are a superb salesman; also subtract pain if you have experience in this exact product field before. Case 2, the pain is in attracting the initial set of customers. Subtract pain if you have a lot of friends who will buy the product; subtract pain if you are natural evangelist (like PT Barnum) or have PR experience; subtract pain if the market is already ready to accept a product that you can build cheaply.