DISQUS

skmurphy · 5 months ago

I would flip your numbers 1 and 2 and stress getting good advisors, whether an informal kitchen cabinet or the more formal relationship that you suggest (we see formal advisors accepting between .1% and 2% of the founding pool, with entities like YCombinator taking perhaps 6%). There will always be a tension with investors and a divergence of incentives.

This is one of the benefits of the Bootstrappers Breakfasts (http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com) that allows bootstrapping entrepreneurs to compare notes on operational issues. You should stop by next time you are in Silicon Valley. They are not meant to take the place of advisory boards or establishing other business relationships, but especially for smaller firms who are bootstrapping they are an opportunity to get advice from peers. We have folks attending who are doing their first venture and some who are on their fifth (the best approach can change over time, and what were good ideas for CD-ROM packaged software designed for customer PC or datacenter may be less powerful for SaaS/Cloud/iPhone platforms).

I think there are number of good places to get technical information, we started the Bootstrapper Breakfasts because practical business advice was harder to come by for technology startups.

Gabriel Weinberg · 5 months ago

Sounds like a great group. I started something similar here in Philadelphia: http://startups.philadelphia.groupomatic.com/. We meet monthly.