Bootstrapping means you funded the entire thing out of pocket without any outside investment.
There's nothing bad/wrong about how you did it, but it's not bootstrapping. Saying it is makes it confusing for newbies which means they're more likely to be taken advantage of by VCs that realize they can market themselves as a "bootstrapper fund."
Thinking about it in such binary terms is quite limiting and unhelpful though. It's a spectrum. I would consider ScrapingBee closer to a bootstrapped company than a venture-funded company. Heck, by your definition if I took $5k of friends & family money to start a business that grew to $5M ARR,I could not call that "bootstrapped".
This is why Rob Walling (co-founder of TinySeed) likes to use the term "fundstrapped". There are a lot more funding options out there that do not come with the narrow pathway associated with typical venture funding.
Why is it unhelpful? Its okay for things to be binary sometimes. This is one of those cases, where the meaning of something, beyond even tech circles, has always meant starting and building a successful business without raising outside capital.
There's no good reason to change the definition of this. The disparagement is trying to co-opt a term that shouldn't be co-opted. If the headline was how we built a 1M ARR business from seed funding it'd be a very compelling article still. Now the sourness comes from trying to redefine a term that has very concrete meaning without providing strong justification for doing so.
I think at the end of the day people don't associate "bootstrapped" with "strangers' money." Of course the cofounder says the definition is "nuanced," because it would have to be in order for them to claim the descriptor, a descriptor that carries weight as a mark of independence. VC is not independence.
They came from Tinyseed, why wouldn't they use "fundstrapped?" Because it doesn't sound as cool, and they know VCs aren't cool as far as the independence denoted by the term "bootstrapped" goes.
It seems there are some definitions that allow for some external funding. I’m of the view that bootstrapped is no external funding; sounds like fundstrapped is a better term. Maybe seed funded.
There's nothing bad/wrong about how you did it, but it's not bootstrapping. Saying it is makes it confusing for newbies which means they're more likely to be taken advantage of by VCs that realize they can market themselves as a "bootstrapper fund."