Comment by b20000

i bootstrapped a hw business and looking back i regret it. i thought i could raise at a better valuation later, and trusted this logic after reading about it on hackernews years ago. however what i found is that the investors i pitched once i had customers, were no longer interested because they thought the traction was too small, and they did not take into account the miniscule capital it took to get there and the impressive effort delivered. so once you have revenue that will be used as a reference. if that revenue is not astronomically large then chances are you can no longer raise and you are stuck without funding to market and sell or hire. to date i have been unable to find a solution to this problem. acquiring customers is not free. curious to hear other similar stories and potential hacks to this problem.