If you’re like me, you’re risk averse. I’m not talking about risks like sky diving or big wave surfing.

No, nothing gets my amygdala firing more than the idea of debt. I hate mortgages. Student loans make me ill, and the very thought of taking lots of money in angel investments or venture capital makes me want to hurl.

Now, I know that taking this kind of investment isn’t debt per se. But it’s not free either. There is so much to think about: Taking on equity partners too soon, or too late. Taking too much cash, or not enough. And on the other hand, there are also very real risks to not accepting equity partners when you need the additional support.

That said, I’m not writing about what freaks me out. I’m writing about what I like about bootstrapping.

Bootstrapping forces you to ship early:

So, you’ve got an idea (a solution to someone’s problem) and you can describe it in thirty seconds or so. But does it hold together at the ten second mark? If so, ship that. Why? Well, don’t forget: Most startup failures aren’t because the product wasn’t developed. Most startups fail because the market wasn’t developed. You can work for months and months, but until you can let your real customers guide you, you’re still just guessing. (And don’t get me wrong, it’s mostly just guessing at this point.)

Here’s how it worked for us: Over beers and market research we cycled through ideas we are convinced have a market, but that we have no real passion for. We thought of simple, silly things just to get us started. Finally, we came up with an idea we thought we would enjoy working on and that there is a real need for. It was a local, mobile, social app with all the requisite game mechanics. We estimated the development time at many months. So we set about cutting out most of what we would have thought, originally, was essential to the product to what we believe is the simplest possible thing that someone would pay $.99 for. This will be our first release. And while it may sound deflating, this whittling project has actually been very clarifying and we’re as excited to use our first iteration as we will be when it’s full-featured.

It forces you to charge for your product sooner:

The competition is stiff. And often, the competition is free. But bootstrapping means that you don’t have the luxury to figure out the business model later. Or to assume that you’ll rely on ads once you get a bunch of traction (which takes time). It means that you need (I mean really need) to validate your idea by finding the people who will actually buy it. And don’t forget, the second best answer to the question of whether there’s a suitable market for your product is, “no”. Bottom line, bootstrapping will force you to face the facts. Quit if it’s not gonna work, take investment if it’s required.

Deciding on the correct price can be an endless exercise in break-even analyses, competitive research, and customer polling. What worked for us was really just recognizing that, at this stage, it is an experiment and we can change it. This is especially easy in the beginning when there is little traction or customer expectation to balance with the business needs.

Bootstrapping requires a limited runway:

We can only go without pay for so long. But it’s more than just that. For us, building a short runway into our project is a sort of self-imposed time compression that lends itself to decisive thinking.

Decisive thinking is easiest to achieve when the scope is narrowed. At this point, the questions are simple. Will anyone even buy our product? Can we attract a new customer for less that it costs to support them? Only then can we ask if there’s enough evidence to indicate that the market is big enough to support the business.

Bootstrapping requires that you learn new things.

For me, this is mostly fun. That is, until we get to the part where it’s really just “sales” that we’re talking about. We’re not sustainable until we make some money, and we’re not making any money without hustling for sales. Bootstrapping will force us to learn and stretch our concept of who we are and what our core strengths are.

All these things make you learn more, faster.

We may even learn what our real business is.