This is what I do as well, so I'll chime in with a few more upsides. (Honestly, I haven't yet found any downsides to bootstrapping vs. going the VC route, so I can't list any).<p>As a single founder, you get the maximum leverage out of being good at what you do. The ratio of deadwood at your company is either zero or one, so as long as you are in fact genuinely good at building things, you can get things built a lot faster than you'd ever expect to see at a larger company.<p>You also get maximum control over what you're building. No cramming in dumb features that don't fit because somebody in marketing decided they might be a good idea. No stepping on anybody's feelings by cutting a feature they wanted or abandoning their vision for what the product should do.<p>And of course you get to play on the whole stack. You get to make the schema changes for that new feature, as well as the back end, layout, and all the fiddly javascript bits. And you get to market that feature and handle customer support for it and play Social Media Coordinator. Racking servers, conference calls with Fortune 500 CEOs, it's all your job.<p>Best of all, you get to decide how much of your life this thing is going to take up. If you're the kind of guy that needs to pour 80 hour weeks into his baby, sacrifice all his free time, lose his girlfriend, and live 100% for his business, then cool. You get to be that guy. Or if you're more of a "roll out of bed at 10am, check HN over coffee, spend a couple hours on a feature then head out to the mountains because the sun's out" kind of guy, then cool too. You can be that guy instead.<p>Whichever path you take, chances are you'll find your way to profitability at some point. And when you do, those profits all flow directly into your bank account. Granted, your "impact" might be "limited" in as much as you might never become a billionaire. But hey, a few hundred grand a year will buy a lot of beer.<p>And since it's really hard to set things up in a small SaaS business so that they consume more than a small fraction of your time once the basic product is out the door, you'll have lots of free time to contemplate where and how to consume said beer.<p>All the best!