

5 ways to bootstrap your startup - yoavush
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/16/5-important-ways-to-successfully-bootstrap-your-venture/

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onion2k
Three of the points are joining an accelerator, taking out loans and crowd-
funding. If you're raising capital through selling equity or taking on debt,
you're not bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is doing it _without_ external money,
working on the side if necessary, until the business has revenue to pay you so
you can do it full-time.

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yoavush
taking loans/crowdfunding do not give away equity and are you trying to say
that joining an accelerator means you can't consider yourself bootstrapping?

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onion2k
Perhaps you're using a different definition of bootstrapping, but in my
understanding it means "starting a business and getting to profitability
without taking external money in the form of selling equity or taking on
debt"[1]. Accelerators pretty much always take a small chunk of equity, and
bank loans are debt (obviously). Crowd-funding in the Kickstarter sense, with
"pre-order" sales of a thing, _is_ bootstrapping, but crowd-funding in the
seedrs sense with a crowd of people investing by-proxy isn't - it's just a
fund raising in a different way.

[1] Similar to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(business)#Financ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\(business\)#Financial_Bootstrapping)

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yoavush
yeah, meant in the kickstarter sense. Anyway, thanks for the comments and
putting time into explaining. see you around and have a beautiful day.

