[yowlingcat]

What does your company do, and why should anyone listen to you? I mean this genuinely. For all we know, you could be running a nearly defunct startup, giving advice that folks shouldn't take. Or, it could be the opposite. Anyways, as I allude to in a sibling comment, cost optimization is the wrong thing to look at when it comes to running a startup. The best way to cost optimize a startup is...to shut it down. If startups are by default hemorrhaging money either quickly or slowly, how do you make them justify the investment with an ROI?

Bootstrapping doesn't intrinsically have anything to do with this kind of strategy. If your idea doesn't have product-market fit, bootstrapping will just make its failure slower and less painful to the founder (assuming the founder continues being able to make money through independent income streams). But it also risks stretching out an idea that would have otherwise failed fast (maybe into a more productive pivot) into a zombie.

With all that said, I think that, for reasons DHH has elucidated and demonstrated far better than I, bootstrapping remains the better way to build businesses for the vast majority of people in the world. But even with that said, it doesn't take out the low success rate of starting a product driven company. Product building is capital-H Hard.

[aaron-lebo]

I'm a nobody and I don't have any work that I'm ready to show you.

You shouldn't take my advice, I very well may not know what I'm talking about. I'm just laying down some beliefs I've got that I plan on testing out. You can't know if you've got a market fit unless you try. That's all I'm advocating.

People give advice on everything here every day, a lot of them won't tell you that they very well could be wrong, but I'm very aware I may be.