> Both companies had successful crowdfunding campaigns but neither is shipping a product yet.
That sounds like you might have to refund some or all of your contributors. After the acquisition, your project will cease to exist. It's unlikely that both crowdfunding promises were exactly the same. Even if the intention is to fold your product into theirs, the realistic outcome is that your employers will ship the product as they intended, leaving your supporters with little to nothing. You need to clean this up now, rather than later.
I've never run into anyone who's defined it the way you do; everyone I've heard define it does it in terms of not yet having taken a cash investment from a non-founder.
"We've bootstrapped the company so far, but we don't think we will ship a MVP without taking at least a seed round" wouldn't draw any protests of misuse, in my experience.
You are correct that most bootstrapped companies that have launched end up supporting themselves; that's survivor bias in action.
I'm more used to three previous definition. I would say those companies have tried to bootstrap, but bit successfully achieved it. Of you are a successfully bootstrapped business, you achieved goals without taking outside investment money.
I'll just add: to estmiate stuff like BATNA, try breaking the problem down and summing up. It's the same as in programming. How do you solve big problems? By breaking them down into littler and littler problems.
Then when you go back to talk to these folks, give them the rationale and the small numbers rather than (just) the big number. If they have issues with your methodology you can likely work it out.
This is largely covered by the book, "Getting to Yes". Short and helpful.
I probably explained that poorly. What I meant was that our products are so similar, and vision so aligned, that we have already independently developed many of the same technologies.
I don't have advisors. Thank you very much for offering to help! I'll send you an email.