by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-15 17:04:43+00:00
If you are going to be VC funded. Yes, absolutely. All you need is smoke and mirrors. And the ability to project confidence about what is otherwise an absolute fantasy that doesn't yet exist. Which is what many startups are until they get their house in order (with VC funding). Sometimes VCs get it right and they'll bore you endlessly about their successes. But the 95% that fail that they also invested in and probably shouldn't have is what they generally don't talk about a lot other than in terms of vague hints about acquihires, mergers, and other tried and proven strategies to make a bad investment look like a good one. The unremarkable airbnb clone, the tinder for X, Y, and Z that never panned out. The too good to be true yet-another market place that amounted to little. All of those.

If you are bootstrapping with revenue instead of money, customers won't be lining up for a product that won't work. They won't be interested in your self serving story about how you built the thing with duct-tape and mud while surviving on ramen noodles without sleeping for five months. That would scare them away probably. You actually need to build something that they would 1) buy and then 2) be happy about buying. And you won't have any VC donated cash to wow/lure/distract them with marketing either. You actually need to sell on product merit rather than founder reputation instead of using your reputation to separate VCs from their cash just so you can get the resources you need to not fake the product. Once the product has proven itself, the VC is redundant.

It's a very different game. Most of the things that work with VCs won't work with customers. And vice versa (you are going to slow, you should be focusing on X instead of Y, and all the other nonsense).

But the good news is, you won't need to scale for a while because bootstrapping isn't a fast process. The bad news is that you might not have a lot of time to fix your scaling issues when you do encounter them and they can and will sink your company if you can't. But the good news is that VCs might show up again that time. The bad news for them is that at that point they are generally too late to make a lot of money and will lose interest. You need a different type of investor at that point. It helps to not have too many huge scaling issues when you finally manage to convince customers that buying your thing is a good idea.

Figuring out the right balance between scalability and utility and when to focus on what is a judgment call in the end. Boring tech is usually a good call. Unless the tech is the main thing that you are selling. But don't let a VC tell you. They are just trying to get you to the 95% quickly just in case you don't make their 5% cut. All this business about scaling, keeping customers happy, etc. is just a distraction. It takes too much time. That could take years. They want months/weeks. They'll be happy to write investments off quickly. That doesn't mean it was a bad investment or plan.

VCs want unicorns or nothing. It's high stakes gambling. Most of the economy is a very different kind of business. There's nothing wrong with building a decent business with your hands and creativity.