@bananas @joepie91

the problems come with investors and raising funds. i know some ppl who created wonderful things bootstrapping it with nothing but their own time, friends. ...but maybe thats not what you'd consider a "startup"

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@serapath @bananas I personally distinguish between "startup" and "small business" where the former exclusively covers VC-backed things, because that is where the term was introduced (in recent history even) and all the 'startup culture' is a direct consequence of that VC involvement

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@joepie91 @bananas

fair enough.
some popular definition is also: startup is when there is no eorking business model yet and ppl pivot and pivot and pivot until they found the business model, which is when its stops being a startup.

i guess under this definition, startups is also what is covered by bootstrapped companies.

I'd love to have a new term for anything that is bootstrapped and is open source too.

imho bitcoin is that. web3 isnt.
...but thats just a random unrelated thought 😅

@serapath @bananas That particular definition doesn't seem very workable to me, because then you end up in endless debate about whether something "has a business model" or not, and the distinction as defined there only really matters to VCs anyway.

Because a startup finding a business model doesn't actually make it any less toxic or unsustainable, it's always trying to achieve impossible ROIs either way.

@joepie91 @bananas
hm...i mean.yeah.

Steve Blank, an entrepreneur who started the "lean startup movement" defines it like that.

once you manage to sell stuff repeatedly and consistently to a target audience and can now pour in money into marketing to scale, then it stops being a startup ...until you are still pivoting... developing and finding "product market fit" ... he considers it a startup.

anyway, i wish there was a specific term for bootstrapping sustainable open source software 🙂

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