Paul GrahamVerified account

Best money is the one paid by customer for using the product

Yeah, but how about someone to give you money because He believed of what you bring to the table, so that you can create customers to pay back more and more.

You can't believed it if I told you we had been 8 months struggling to raise $67k in Nigeria.

Always true. Fundraising is painful. Imagine you’re climbing a mountain, and you’re just about to get to the peak. You pull yourself up to the peak and someone kicks you off the peak and you fall all the way to the bottom. Now you have to start all over again. That’s fundraising.

I'd love to hear your opinions about the merits of bootstrapping (aka. not fundraising even once, never mind fundraising *again*). I'm guessing somewhere between "raising funding typically increases P(success) enough to outweigh the suck factor" and "bootstrap if you can"?

I think it's important to know if there are network or winner-take-all effects in your industry. If there are, you need to ensure you have sufficient capital to become the winner before another company beats you to it and locks you out (even if your product/cashflow is better).