Points 1 through 3 are off. Point 4 is bang on though. You don't need 250k to 300k, and if you had it you'd wish you had 500k or 750k anyway. A longer runway puts off the scary point where you have to launch something. You can bootstrap a startup with very little capital if you have the skills to do the work yourself, or you have co-founders with those skills, or most importantly you're happy for things to take longe…
Amen. It's such a common problem. And one I totally get. The first possible MVP is so far from a founder's vision that it's very easy to say, "Well, let's just add X". And then repeat and repeat and repeat.
More than a decade ago I was the technical cofounder for a former colleague. He had an idea that was really compelling at the time, one for whom the key engine of growth would be Facebook sharing. He quickly raised $1.2m from some name-brand VCs as a seed. We both had strong backgrounds in user testing, so we looked vigorously for ways to find out if our approach made sense to users.
He hit upon the idea of getting people off Craigslist under the guise of market research. Before we had built anything, he'd bring people in and have them try out a few different sites and give opinions. One of them was Facebook, which they'd log into using their own account. But what they didn't know until after was that we used Greasemonkey to generate fake newsfeed entries supposedly from their real friends.
One of our key assumptions was around viral growth, so we wanted them to react positively and possibly try to sign up for our site. What actually happened is that most people hated it. We tried a bunch of variations and they still mostly hated it. So we went to our first board meeting on Sand Hill Road and told them that the thing we all thought brilliant 6 weeks before was actually a bad idea and we had data to prove it. They were... nonplussed. Happily by then we had our next idea ready to pitch so they didn't murder us or anything, but I did worry.
The thing that we didn't learn until later was that two other companies had pitched and gotten funded for basically the same idea at about the same time. Between them they raised something like $12 million. And I forget the details now, but each of them persisted for something like 12-18 months longer than we did before they gave up.
I'm convinced that raising less made us more aggressive in our testing and more willing to pivot. And even if it didn't, I still take pride in wasting way less money on dry holes.