This book is about you! It's about giving you the motivation and the guidance you need to start your own business without having to raise millions in venture capital. It's about giving you the confidence that you can succeed with your ideas by showing you how others, just like you, did it. It's about showing you what business models have been proven successful by bootstrapping and to help you identify how to find your own ideas for a business. I have researched thousands of startups. I'm intrigued to learn how they did it and more importantly, how more people like you can follow in their success. Bootstrapped shares the stories of a carefully selected 75 startups and entrepreneurs from a variety of industries and backgrounds. While we often read about the Facebook's and Google's of the world, the vast majority (i.e. the 99+ %) of startups never raise any venture capital and yet they find ways to become profitable and succeed all the while getting to maintain complete control of their companies. Bootstrapped uncovers these hidden stories to show you that it's all possible. The media and to an extent, our society, provide a false perception that in order to successfully start a business, you need to raise a lot of money. While this may be true for a small percentage of companies (i.e., the 1%) that require millions in startup capital to grow to $Billion companies, it is untrue for more than 99% of successful startups. In Bootstrapped, you will learn not only how these savvy entrepreneurs bootstrapped their businesses, but you'll also learn how they came up with their ideas, the steps they took to transform their ideas into a business, and how they ultimately built and scaled their businesses to success. Let's face it, most of us want to start our own business, but we often don't know where to start. In fact, just getting started is the BIGGEST reason why most of us never do it. And there are 2 false ideas that we give ourselves that are the cause of our inability to START something great: 1.) I don't have a good idea 2.) I don't have enough money Bootstrapped will show you that finding a "good" business idea is a lot easier than you think AND that you often don't need a lot (if any) money to get started with your idea. Bootstrapped isn't about selling you a pipe dream. It's about showing you real life stories of how real life entrepreneurs did it, and more importantly, they show you how you can do it too.
About the Author: I founded, bootstrapped, and sold FiGuide.com, an online personal finance media company. I wrote Bootstrapped because the vast majority of successful startups are bootstrapped and profitable, but their stories aren't heard. There aren't enough case studies published to show you how to start a profitable business without having to go raise millions in venture capital. I got tired of hearing the media overplay the success of companies backed by huge amounts of venture capital. Rather than give aspiring entrepreneurs the tools they need to increase their odds of building a successful startup, the media provides them with "pipe" dreams of becoming the next Marc Benioff or Mark Zuckerberg. I researched company after company, story after story, to find the companies and the entrepreneurs that I thought set perfect examples of how to build a business without having to raise millions or billions in venture capital. These companies and entrepreneurs represent people like you and me. Normal, everyday people who developed an idea and a knack for entrepreneurship and made it happen.