Ask HN: Bootstrapped business is good but slow growth. Should I raise money?

I'm looking to relocate to NYC/DC and I have a passive income stream that supports me. I've been looking for jobs that would utilize my journalism/sales experience, but with a focus on technology.

Care to chat?

Gut feeling: that's a high revenue for one person. It can be easy to take for granted if the growth took a long time. But just wanted to offer another data point, that my old partner and I only managed about $1500 a month on our best month selling shareware games 15 years ago (this was before app stores, we were high on sites like download.com, but never saw anything approaching exponential growth).

It’s straightforward to make more than that consulting. The catch is that consulting businesses generally have no intrinsic value. Their value is in the workers, so if there are N people and one of them leaves, they’re worth about 1/N less. In other words, the have less resale value than product businesses.

So I would say, if you want your business to be worth something, consider streamlining it to the point where it no longer needs you. The catch to that is that it isn’t something you do while you are still working on your minimum viable product (MVP). So ask yourself:

1) are you still getting established? - then bootstrap, nobody will lend you money other than credit card companies

2) or are you at a point where you have some breathing room? - consider funding from family and friends because even long tail decline can pay them back

3) or is everything in place to the point where you are ready for exponential growth? - raise big money

I started writing a big spiel about brick and mortar stores and getting loans in exchange for a stake in the business but it wasn’t something that couldn’t be gleaned from watching a few episodes of Shark Tank.

The way I see it is, you’re probably still a consultancy, still in phase 1, but on the threshold of phase 2. But congats, because most people never make it that far. So are you familiar enough with promotion and branding to get new business on your own? Or can you find a partner somewhere who is as established as you in some way (having either skills or cash), who will help you rather than hinder you? Or do you have a family friend who has experience running a business and more importantly, has the cash you get you to phase 2 in a short amount of time?

Concretely, it sounds like you need money so you can give your full attention to refactoring and hiring for growth, and you know an angel investor. Don’t hold onto the job. But don’t go and borrow more money than you need either. You’re in a unique position where you could borrow 6 months or a year’s wages without having to work for and save that money yourself (which takes 10 times longer - so if you wanted to save $10,000, you would have to earn $100,000, which most people don’t have the means to do, and that’s the actual thing that stops people from starting their own businesses, not dedication or talent or the things that hackers tell themselves to feel special). As a general rule, a bank might lend you what you have in savings. But an angel investor might lend you a lot more for some percentage of the business. A partner would want half, but maybe there’s a sweet spot where you could borrow more and give up less, because you have enough cashflow to survive on your own without the money. I made the choice to give up my job and go it alone a couple of years ago, but I don’t have 2 kids to support, and now it’s not so much about the money as missing the interaction with smart people. So now ironically having a great team and a sustainable income would be more attractive to me than any amount of money, because the sky would be the limit. Maybe thinking about what you really want, and accepting that you’re being given a special opportunity rather than merely weighing risks, will help you decide how to proceed. Good luck!

Would love to chat. Coffee or lunch on me too since you are in NYC :). How do I get in touch ? I don't see your contact info in your profile.

wow. I heavily use Woocommerce in our app because we charget subscription and then our clients sell things as well. And yes, it is so powerful and just works. Unfortunately, I have overall issues with Wordpress to be utilized as a scalable SAAS product. But no denying the power of these plugins.

You can reach me with an email to this address: mr.sean.cox@gmail.com