Disclaimer: I am currently building my first product and have no idea how any of this works.

In this day and age where almost every service you’ll ever need in tech offers a free tier and is reasonably affordable for scale, why do startups need funding?

For example, I am a relatively talented full-stack dev, if I were to build a website/app I can do it all by myself in a reasonable amount of time. I do understand that this is not the case for everyone, but for those that it is, why can’t they do this:
Build a product -> get a few users -> (make money from those sales ->) put that money into marketing -> get more users -> more money -> bigger marketing -> repeat

I’m more surprised when I read that a SaaS received funding because they usually don’t need a huge research and development team that a company like OpenAI would need nor do they depend on ad revenue which pays cents.

  • cooki3tiem@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    If I could, there’s a good talk by Jason Cohen talking about bootstrapping WP Engine.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw

    The reason I like this one is that they actually are externally funded now but they didn’t take funding until they were a well established, multi-million dollar revenue company.

    So if you’re ever worried, just remember it’s not black and white. You can bootstrap until you die, bootstrap then take funding once you’re more established, or try for funding from day 1.