Well, yes and no. I'm saying that knowing when to spend money, and when not to, is a fine balancing act for the bootstrapper, and that it's self-defeating to concentrate more on saving money than on generating more revenue.
As an example: very early in my business, I paid the monthly fees for crossbrowsertesting.com (a great service btw). Some months, I could barely afford it, but at the time I was doing a lot of web work and I justified the expense by how much time was saved dealing with follow-up issues from clients.
Conversely, I really struggled for a while because I waited too long to hire on help, and I could no longer manage my business's growth by myself. Clients got frustrated, deadlines lagged, and I wasted a lot of effort trying to save the additional cost each month of some help.
I've also found that, for me, having expenses helps to motivate me to keep growing the business. It would be possible to survive as a business by simply cutting costs until the costs were lower than the revenues, but I prefer to look at it inversely: keep growing the revenues so that they stay higher than the costs. I have no idea if that would work for you, but it might be worth trying for a while.
So, yeah, if you could pay for a service that would help you create more value, then maybe you should do that. You might find that when it creates more value for you, you're able to handle more customers, which helps you to find the time to go out and get those extra customers that you need to pay for the service.
As an example: very early in my business, I paid the monthly fees for crossbrowsertesting.com (a great service btw). Some months, I could barely afford it, but at the time I was doing a lot of web work and I justified the expense by how much time was saved dealing with follow-up issues from clients.
Conversely, I really struggled for a while because I waited too long to hire on help, and I could no longer manage my business's growth by myself. Clients got frustrated, deadlines lagged, and I wasted a lot of effort trying to save the additional cost each month of some help.
I've also found that, for me, having expenses helps to motivate me to keep growing the business. It would be possible to survive as a business by simply cutting costs until the costs were lower than the revenues, but I prefer to look at it inversely: keep growing the revenues so that they stay higher than the costs. I have no idea if that would work for you, but it might be worth trying for a while.
So, yeah, if you could pay for a service that would help you create more value, then maybe you should do that. You might find that when it creates more value for you, you're able to handle more customers, which helps you to find the time to go out and get those extra customers that you need to pay for the service.