[gabosarmiento]

I’ve bootstrapped a few startups by selling first to people already in my network. Friends either became early customers or introduced me to someone who might have the problem I was solving. From there, I focused on making the offer difficult to refuse: price it fairly, promise something concrete, and overdeliver.

I also tried to set the deal size high enough to fund more than the bare minimum needed to complete the work. That gave me room to improve the product rather than simply survive from one sale to the next.

Sometimes the first revenue does not come directly from the core product. It can come from related activities such as events, training, online courses, consulting, or agency work. Those can finance the startup and help you understand the customer, but agency work is particularly risky because it is easy to become trapped delivering custom projects instead of building the product.