How to bootstrap a Startup with less than $10k. Meet Tipsandtrip.

Wait a second... we'll have to find a new word for the concept currently known as bootstrapping, because articles like these make the word completely meaningless.<p>Bootstrapping means creating a <i>self-sustaining</i> business. At a minimum, this means you have revenue to cover your running costs. You can only say "bootstrap with less than $10K" if that 10K gives your business enough revenue to cover its running costs. Yet this is what one of the founders has to say in another comment here on HN: <i>We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues.</i><p>I guess it's not the founders' fault that the article was written this way. But once they've spent a lot of time and money on actually building their community/traffic + the inevitable further development costs, and they start making some revenue, we'll know how much it cost them to bootstrap the business.<p>Some great tips for getting an MVP together though.

One of the things that always bothers me about the "How to build and launch a product with &#60;$X" articles is the fact that they almost always talk about the costs of outsourcing design/development but almost never talk about the actual costs of living for founders. You know what I'd love to see? Articles about how a couple of scrappy founders cut their living costs to the bone, keep the majority of development in-house (assuming there's a tech founder), and outsource when needed. All of this while trying to get to launch/MVP before the founders' savings run out or need to concentrate on consulting for a while to pay the bills.

Great example of what Guy Kawasaki (and many others to be fair) have been preaching for quite some time now. If you have a web-based idea there's really no excuse not to give it a shot. Related to this great post I also suggest 1) the StartupTools wiki (started by the awesome guys at Songkick) <a href="http://startuptools.pbwiki.com/" rel="nofollow">http://startuptools.pbwiki.com/</a> and 2) a post I read last night about how to hire a programmer to make your idea happen (<a href="http://sivers.org/how2hire" rel="nofollow">http://sivers.org/how2hire</a>).<p>I agree that this app is going to face fierce competition from well funded companies, but the accomplishment so far is great so congrats and best of luck!

since when is the milestone for bootstrapping "launch"? I thought it was always profitability?

Great job of getting to MVP on the cheap! But it seems like a budget of $10K or so would only work for relatively simple apps. Doing something like Dropbox, 280Atlas, or FlightCaster (probably) would take significantly more money.<p>Any suggestions for how you'd proceed if you knew up front that you were facing a much longer development cycle?

Newbie question: the thing that always puzzles me is where these folks get their data from (in this case the list of restaurants with details). Anybody know how one can go about getting their hands on stuff like that? Is it all available for free on some site I just haven't heard of yet?

@fabio, yes, exactly what we did. We gave it a shot and wanted also to test the many different services available to crowdsource workforce.

Here to answer any question you have on tipsandtrip :)

so, how does this free app plan to make profit?