I'd say a compounding factor is if you go this route for a while and then decide raising money is truly the best course of action, it's suddenly a lot harder.

I'd say a compounding factor is if you go this route for a while and then decide raising money is truly the best course of action, it's suddenly a lot harder. Rather than just selling a dream, you're selling a dream backed up by two years of meager growth. Most people simply lie about their prospects and have the proverbial hockey stick on their graphs, but when you've bootstrapped you have actual data you need to include. I felt like I hit that point with Mogotest. We had ironed out a lot of kinks, didn't piss away investor money on a 1.0 product that pivoted to something else, and spent a lot of time establishing a name for ourselves and doing market education. But when the time came to raise for growth, I was a bit surprised (naiveté in action) at just how much harder it was. It's not impossible of course, but if you're going to bootstrap, I'd just be aware that reassessing that approach may be much harder than just taking money to begin with.