Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

@Daolf - congrats on the building, definitely NOT easy to do.

What growth metrics did Tiny look at? Did the investment come at a time when the business was needing to "survive, sustain, or grow"? [every business has all of those phases]




Thanks a lot.

> What growth metrics did Tiny look at?

I assume you mean during the application process. So they asked just the basic stuff, MRR, growth, churn. We were at $1k5 MRR when we applied and $3k when we got it. I think what worked for us during the process was that Kevin had been running a small Java web scraping blog + book at that time.

> Did the investment come at a time when the business was needing to "survive, sustain, or grow"?

We were slowly switching from survival to sustain mode. They allowed to make the transition and go full grow mode.


> They allowed to make the transition and go full grow mode.

The point of bootstrapping is making the compromise where you trade a lower growth rate for the benefit of retaining 100% ownership of your business. Your statement is a VC funding model, even if the money is called seed and you are not trying to become a unicorn.

Your giving away equity for money is simply not bootstrapping. Calling your business bootstrapped is lying in my opinion. What I think doesn’t matter, but being deceitful is silently judged by others where their opinions do matter to you, and the consequences of that are usually invisible.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: