[tptacek]

That depends on what kind of business you want to start. I'm a fan of growing slow and not taking outside capital. It worked pretty well for me, and working with VC, not so much. But the fact that bootstrapping works for some products doesn't mean it works for all of them. In particular, a product with serious operating costs and high cost of user acquisition is hard to bootstrap.

It's one thing to sell products to, say, every freelance developer in the world. Freelance developers are (relatively speaking) wealthy and interested in products that improve their practices. Parents are not generally in an ambient state of seeking products to secure their kids Internet connections. That makes them hard to reach and sell to.