[jandrewrogers]

Many startups are not website hacked together over a few months, they require much more time and more capital. Even limiting it to the domain of software-based services, applications that are based on genuinely new software technology still require building an enormous amount of software infrastructure that cannot be slapped together with a clever bit of scripting. Most of the really interesting stuff requires capital because it requires a lot of very careful and very high-end code development.

I would strongly recommend bootstrapping if possible but that is not feasible for many cases. Some people conflate the "<well-known startup> for <noun> website" startups with the actual technology startups. If your startup requires shipping a 100k lines of novel and bulletproof code, you are not going to be doing it for less than a couple million bucks. Software development of the purest kind is expensive but it also produces much of the interesting value.