> One of the biggest laments I've run into trying to help someone get businesses bootstrapped is some of the very lessons you just shared.
This is one of those things that makes hardware businesses so darn hard and something software-only startup folks just don't understand. The marginal cost difference and phasing of money you need to support, say 10K SaaS clients vs. shipping 10K non-trivial hardware products can be massive.
In my case the company was 100% bootstrapped. In retrospect I should have gone for investment as soon as we started to take flight. Frankly, I was too busy gasping for air (money) and absolutely overloaded with work to even consider it. Any investor type I spoke to was going to suck time and resources I simply did not have. So we kept going. Had it not been for the 2008 economic downturn we would have had an amazing exit.
> That sharing is so damn rare
Frankly, the experience was at the limit of darkness for me and sharing was nearly impossible for years. In December of 2009 I wrote a friend an email where, among other things, I said "I now understand, in no uncertain terms, why people jump off buildings or walk in front of trains during hard times". He was knocking on my front door within 15 minutes, after breaking the sound barrier driving from his office to mine.
No, I wasn't thinkin of ending my life. Not even close. It's just that the darkness I was facing at that moment in time produced a clarity of understanding I had never had before. I felt that I had full understanding of how someone could make that kind of a decisions. I was simply communicating the revelation I had. I can see how bad it must have sounded.
This is one of those things that makes hardware businesses so darn hard and something software-only startup folks just don't understand. The marginal cost difference and phasing of money you need to support, say 10K SaaS clients vs. shipping 10K non-trivial hardware products can be massive.
In my case the company was 100% bootstrapped. In retrospect I should have gone for investment as soon as we started to take flight. Frankly, I was too busy gasping for air (money) and absolutely overloaded with work to even consider it. Any investor type I spoke to was going to suck time and resources I simply did not have. So we kept going. Had it not been for the 2008 economic downturn we would have had an amazing exit.
> That sharing is so damn rare
Frankly, the experience was at the limit of darkness for me and sharing was nearly impossible for years. In December of 2009 I wrote a friend an email where, among other things, I said "I now understand, in no uncertain terms, why people jump off buildings or walk in front of trains during hard times". He was knocking on my front door within 15 minutes, after breaking the sound barrier driving from his office to mine.
No, I wasn't thinkin of ending my life. Not even close. It's just that the darkness I was facing at that moment in time produced a clarity of understanding I had never had before. I felt that I had full understanding of how someone could make that kind of a decisions. I was simply communicating the revelation I had. I can see how bad it must have sounded.