I was at a business networking event this week and left super energised. Everyone I spoke to was building something they believed in: a gaming platform, an app for couples activities, a holistic wellness app, virtual venue software, and plenty more. The enthusiasm in the room was real. So was the talent.
There's a question that came up again and again, in different forms, from founders at an early stage: "I've built it, now what? VC or bootstrap?"
Here's my honest answer, and it's probably not what most founders expect to hear. For most founders asking this question right after finishing their product, the real answer is: you're not ready to choose yet, and that's not a problem to fix quickly, it's useful information. Don’t rush this decision.
The founders who navigate this best don't treat VC and bootstrapping as a decision to make right away. They treat them as sequential options, that is tools you become eligible for once you have evidence, not philosophies you must commit to on day one.
And that's the real mistake I see most often at this stage. Not choosing VC when you should have bootstrapped, or vice versa. It's confusing enthusiasm and belief with actual market validation, and using that belief to skip straight to a funding decision before you've earned the right to make it.
Believing deeply in what you've built is necessary. It's the fuel that gets a company through its hardest early months. But it is not evidence that a market exists to sustain it. And neither VC nor a serious bootstrap strategy should be built on belief alone.
Before you're genuinely equipped to decide between VC and bootstrapping, the evidence-gathering work looks the same regardless of which path you'll eventually take. That's the part most funding advice skips over.
Getting there isn't just a matter of time. It's a matter of doing the commercial groundwork most founders skip. That means being genuinely clear on who you're selling to and why they'd choose you, having a sales narrative that holds up in a real conversation with a real buyer, and pricing that reflects the value you deliver rather than a guess. Revenue doesn't appear because a product is finished. It appears because the commercial foundations underneath it are solid enough to convert belief into a paying customer who understands the value of your product and stays with you.
Seed investors today expect real traction, often in the form of meaningful revenue signal and not just a working product, before they'll write a cheque. That bar has risen noticeably in the last two years. Whether you eventually raise or not, the work required to get there is identical: paying or deeply engaged customers, evidence people come back without being chased, and a clear, specific answer to who this is for and why they need it now.
Whether an MVP is even necessary before raising also depends entirely on what you can already prove. Experienced founding teams with a track record can sometimes raise earlier. Everyone else needs to show the market wants this, not just that the product works. A small number of exceptional teams can skip this step entirely but for the founders I work with, an MVP and paying customers are what actually earns the room to choose deliberately, rather than by default.
And the commercial upside of doing this work first is real and well documented. Founders who wait until they have genuine traction before approaching investors consistently get better valuations and more favourable terms than those pitching on an idea and a deck alone. This is because traction removes risk, and less risk means better terms, whichever direction you go next.
Once you have that evidence, and well after you’ve laid the commercial foundations, the positioning and messaging narrative that will get you traction and paying customers who understand the value of your solution, the VC-or-bootstrap decision becomes genuinely clearer, because the business itself starts telling you what it needs.
If your market rewards speed such as genuine network effects, a land grab dynamic, real first-mover advantage then capital to move fast starts to matter more. If your business can reach profitability on its own revenue without needing to out-scale a well-funded competitor, you may never need external capital at all, and giving up equity and control for growth you could have funded yourself is a cost you don't need to pay.
Avast is a genuinely instructive example here, not because every business should follow its exact path, but because of what it demonstrates about optionality. The company was built and grown for 22 years by two founders with no personal wealth, no investors, no capital markets even accessible to them under the regime at the time. They built all the way to global scale, before raising its first outside funding round in 2010. It went on to be acquired by NortonLifeLock in a deal worth $8 billion in 2021, on terms it was in a position to negotiate from strength, not from need.
That's the real advantage of building the commercial foundations and evidence first. It's not that bootstrapping is morally superior to raising, or the reverse. It's that founders who wait until they have real proof with paying customers get to choose deliberately, from a position of leverage, rather than defaulting into whichever path felt most available when they finished the product.
What impressed me the most was the conviction in the room. Every founder I spoke to genuinely believed in what they were building, as they should.
My honest advice to every one of them is the same: don't rush the question of how to fund this. Spend the next few months proving, as specifically and honestly as you can, that people beyond yourselves want it enough to pay for it or keep coming back to it. That evidence is what turns belief into a business, and it's what will make the VC-or-bootstrap decision, when you're finally ready to make it, obvious rather than a guessing game.
Key sources referenced:
CRV, "MVP Stage of Startup: What Investors Expect Before Series A"
Antler, "Why Startups Don't Always Need an MVP Before Seeking Pre-Seed Investment"
Silicon Valley Bank, "Startup Bootstrapping: Putting Revenue Before Fundraising"
Paul O'Brien, "Bootstrapped Startups Don't Win More Often; You're Reading the Data Wrong"
Fortune, "NortonLifeLock Shares Boom Amid $8 Billion Plan to Acquire Avast", August 2021, and Tracxn company profile