I had no choice but to bootstrap; it was

[rifat28dddd]

How to Use My Y Combinator Experience to Become a Better Entrepreneur
If you’re a young entrepreneur filled with big dreams and few ideas about how to make them a reality, here’s what I’d tell you:

YC is not a lottery. You can’t just keep buying tickets and expecting to get in. You have to do constant work outside of YC. Focus on growing yourself into the kind of founder who would get into YC. Meet new people. Do hard things. Iterate new products and prototypes rather than polishing slide decks. Seek out real user feedback.
All roads leading to YC are different. My journey to YC was slow, largely because I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe if I’d been born in Silicon Valley or gone to Stanford or knew how to code, it would have been a lot smoother. Your road, too, will be completely different—you’ll have different advantages, disadvantages, and lessons to learn. And anyone who tells you they know the “one surefire way” to get into YC is probably full of shit.
Embrace rejection. Rejection can teach you more than success. If you do big things, you’ll invite more rejection into your life. That’s just part of the trade-off. Learn to take it in stride. “No” is just a word with two letters. Get comfortable with it.
When I moved to Silicon Valley, I thought that if I landed a million dollars in funding, I would have made it.

Looking back years later, I know that the dream of raising investment was the wrong dream to chase. Funding shouldn’t be the goal—it’s a means to an end.

I tried like hell to raise investment for my startup, Close, but there were zero takers.


But I’m glad I was forced to take the self-funded approach. Close has since scaled to $30 million in ARR, proving that bootstrapping can lead to some pretty amazing growth for B2B SaaS startups.

In this article, I’ll share my experience with the practical albania telegram data realities of bootstrapping so founders know what to expect if they choose to self-fund their startup.

What Funding Options Do You Have as a SaaS Founder?
These days, there are more funding options than ever: seed investors, angel investors, an incubator, or a VC firm. You could also take on debt, max out all your credit cards, or if you’re really patient, just wait for an invitation to Shark Tank. (You might be waiting a while.)

There's no one-size-fits-all approach that works for every company, but in my experience in SaaS and B2B, there’s very rarely a reason or need to raise millions right away and invest in a ton of things before you even go to market and validate demand. Instead, you might want to consider the option I took with Close: bootstrapping.