[bruce511]

Bootstrapping is about building a business first, and developing software second.

We took 5 years of little to no income to realise we were in the business of business, not the business of software.

The years we spent writing software were more-or-less wasted, once we realized that -marketing- and sales were the drivers the we spent time on that, and less time dreaming up new things to write.

In other words when evaluating new ideas the primary questions become "Who is the market? How will I reach them? Can I afford that? Can they afford this? Will they care enough to pay cold hard cash?"

Before that we evaluated ideas on merit "is this cool? Does it have utility? Is it better than what already exists?" All of which are meaningless if there's no market share left, if you can't reach the customer, if they're not in enough pain to care, or if they can't afford you.

Once this truth that our focus is business not software, THEN we started making enough money to get paid salaries. But nothing like FAANG level salaries.