Those are both very interesting links, thanks for sharing, I feel like I learned a lot from them. In addition I liked the following link I stumbled upon as it c

Those are both very interesting links, thanks for sharing, I feel like I learned a lot from them. In addition I liked the following link I stumbled upon as it confirmed in large part my suspicions: http://www.artificialignorance.net/blog/startup/the-startup-meme-phase-1-the-prototype/ http://www.artificialignorance.net/blog/startup/the-startup-... I'm not familiar with how a lean startup is supposed to handle the alpha stage and so I'll need to read up on that. Regarding bootstrapping, I think our issue was to try to get some funding asap so we can start working on the project full time. We have very few engineering resources as the best hackers are already hard at work at their full time jobs and with funding we could be able to dedicate all of our attention to the project. My opinion has always been that you need to prove that whatever you're doing is doable, confirm the hypothesis that someone would want to use it, before you go to people and ask for money. We might not have the luxury to be able to wait that long, but perhaps there's simply no other option and therefore it might take years before we can leave our full times :) Something else I haven't found so far were examples of alpha demos that these now famous startups did back in the day. I've seen collections of demos for TechCrunch and other venues, where for example DropBox already had thousands of users and 10 developers on the team, but that's way past the stage I'm more interested in. I'd love to see, for example, what DropBox looked like when they just had a prototype.