Bootstrapping is the financing strategy of building a company without outside equity investment, funded by founder savings, customer revenue, and reinvested profit. It is a deliberate choice about how the company is financed, distinct from the resulting company type ([Bootstrap Startup]), and it sits at one end of the founder financing spectrum opposite institutional [Venture Capital].
In practice, bootstrapping draws on a stack of non-dilutive sources in roughly this order: founder cash and savings (typically the first $5K to $50K), revenue from paying customers (the largest source for any bootstrapped company that survives), reinvested profit (the engine of growth from year two onward), founder credit (cards and lines of cre...