I have loads of respect for your views on marketing and sticking to those beliefs of high quality content as being the best long-game. Keep it up Alex, building a fan-base is always the best ROI.

I think the hardest thing about bootstrapping is making ends meet in the meantime and patiently waiting. Number 2 really speaks to me! I’m lucky enough to have an incredible, full-stack, technical co-founder, but we both have full time jobs. I often wonder how much further we’d be along if we could dedicate more time. Nonetheless, evryeone I talk to, even VCs, say don’t raise the money. It’s strange, though, because it seems that that is what puts the ‘sexy’ in startups. Every story in the media (Fast Company, Inc, Etc.) is about series A,B,C and how amazing everything is. It’s nice to come here and and get some real, grounded advice. You’re a signal in the noise!

Thanks again,

Roger Rowles

Linguaplex – Perfect English, every time.
https://www.linguaplex.com

When you work in a corporate world, you begin to identify inefficiencies and gaps in processes or workflows or products that exist and continue to exist and so that begins to trigger ideas and inventions that lay the ground work for building product as a solution.

Free Blogs, Forums, Social Channels, Learning Conferences do give exposure as to what is coming up and what is not available today and how companies and people try to solve the issues of today without your perfect idea and then it happens!

Instead of advertising yourself, it is much better to understand if something already does exist. If it does exist how can I make this better and different from current. And if it does not, what would bloggers or forum or social media community would say from both ends of the spectrum as Input and as Output, Needed or Not Needed.

What are you trying to solve? How will it help?

Thank you,

Bluepen Software
http://www.bluepensoftware.com
https://twitter.com/bluepensoftware

Couple of comments on the question of how early to raise money for developers:

– it does depend
– ideally after you’ve done substantial validation and customer development
– in our case, we were pivoting from an unsuccessful product to a new concept, and with a family to feed, I needed investment to keep me and my co-founder together
– if we’d gone off to get paid income, chances are we’d have never got going again
– when you do start developing, get a technical founder / leader early on

Me and my co founder are not first time founders but this blog still resonate with us. We have a lot of things we need to improve and you made us realize that through this blog post. Thanks for these tips 🙂

Good one ! We launched our product on our time alone without any investors. That was 3 years ago. We work from home and do not own a brand new shiny building like our competitor. Now we have 5 brands, thousands of users in 20 countries…and growing. Yay !