To offer my perspective on it. For the startup I am currently building Caido, we decided to go bootstrap. We started working on the project early 2021 and full time since the beginning of 2022.
We put around 15k in the business as of now and we are still only two working on it. It is realy hard and we have other contracts to pay the bills. I would say I worked around 60h / week for the past 6 months without any vacation.
That being said I still prefer that to VC and the closer we get to commercial launch, the better I feel about that decision as we are somewhat of a niche product and when I look back at me of 6 months ago I was way too green to be put in charge of 1.5M$ and I expect I will say the same in 6 months (feels like years passed).
Now that I got a couple punches in the face and dealt with actually building a business (paperwork, accounting, lawyer, goverment stuff, people issues, etc) in a "safe" environment I feel I would better prepared to build a rocketship.
You're being downvoted but this is especially true of open source projects. Raising money ties the future of the project to the future of the commercial endeavor and misaligns development incentives.
We put around 15k in the business as of now and we are still only two working on it. It is realy hard and we have other contracts to pay the bills. I would say I worked around 60h / week for the past 6 months without any vacation.
That being said I still prefer that to VC and the closer we get to commercial launch, the better I feel about that decision as we are somewhat of a niche product and when I look back at me of 6 months ago I was way too green to be put in charge of 1.5M$ and I expect I will say the same in 6 months (feels like years passed).
Now that I got a couple punches in the face and dealt with actually building a business (paperwork, accounting, lawyer, goverment stuff, people issues, etc) in a "safe" environment I feel I would better prepared to build a rocketship.