Ask HN: Take a small seed round, or remain bootstrapped?

1 points by bootstrpppin 1 year ago | 3 comments

My co-founder and I have been bootstrapping two products since the start of the year.

1 of them is in market, got early traction and growing slowly organically but, given a lot more time and effort, could be a decent sized business.

The second is a earlier, but again, could be a decent sized business.

We've chosen to bootstrap because we like the idea of the:

- Flexibility to shift to new projects/opportunities

- Building a cash-generating business (vs. waiting for a future exit)

- Working to our timelines/goals, instead of those of an investor

We have a potential opportunity to raise about $350k, for 10% from very founder-friendly fund.

We don't _need_ the cash, but it may help accelerate things.

Intuitively taking the cash injection feels like a no-brainer, but part of me never expects to exit this business because we hope to just live off the cash it generates.

Has anybody been in a similar situation? Any war stories or advice?

bell-cot 1 year ago |

> but it may help accelerate things

That doesn't sound like you need the $350k much. And there's a lot of overhead to having outside investors. I'd focus on bootstrapping for 6-12 more months, then maybe reexamine things.

bootstrpppin 1 year ago | |

What kind of overhead are you referring to?

I've not raised before - would be helpful to know much work that overhead is.

bell-cot 1 year ago | | |

IANAL, and it'll depend on the current legal structure of your start-up, and the jurisdiction you're in, and how formal you are with your co-founder about such things, and the funder's requirements and preferences, and etc. etc. etc... But you'll very likely have to spend a lot of time with lawyers (who ain't free) and your funder, and paperwork - discussing & planning & doing stuff which does nothing to actually bootstrap you faster or better. Plus figuring out what the heck is worth spending the $350k on. Plus ongoing regular formal reporting & interactions with your funder.

It's impossible for me to quantify how much $cost & time & emotional effort that'll be - but it's extremely likely to be substantial. And for what? You described what your start-up needed as "a lot more time & effort". Not "capital investment".