Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct. > MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed > And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now
Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest. So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct. But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this. Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0). TinySeed works even if they…
Instead of contrasting Bootstrap VS Crazy-VC-Mode, it's more suitable to compare two different things. One is if you're bootstrapped or not, and if you're not, are you doing Tiny-VC-Mode or Crazy-VC-Mode? In this case you chose not to be bootstrapped, and are doing the Tiny-VC-Mode.
It's great that going Tiny-VC-Mode allowed you to grow at your speed and still remain independent, much better than the Crazy-VC-Mode usually allows. But if we start calling that "bootstrapped", then where does the line go for what is bootstrapping a business or not. The meaning would have to change from "Without any outside money" to "With a little bit of outside money, but still independent" which says something else.
Edit: Another way to see it: You still bootstrapped the early stages of the company, up until the point where you accepted outside investments. So according to you post, you joined TinySeed in May 2020, which your graph under "Slowly reaching $10k MRR" (https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/e1ea487c1823d29fb55da4...) show to be right around $5K MRR. So what you bootstrapped was up until "$60000 ARR", but after that you were no longer bootstrapped as TinySeed provided capital to you.
