The Bootstrapping Exam: Escaping from “Trusting Trust”
Published in 2024, this chronicle by @hlandau details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 12 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 3 comments
Which is a big assumption. Going to such extreme measures to bootstrap from scratch could be worth it if it provided an ironclad guarantee you couldn't get any other way. But if, after all that, you're still relying on a giant mass of proprietary code that just happens to be written in Verilog instead of C… then what's the point?
That said, for a recent attempt to at least make progress on trustable hardware, see Precursor:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor ↗
I assume step 7 could be accomlished by tccboot, a c compiler capable of booting linux straight from source code. Expand it with the possibiliy to show the hash of the source code in ROM. No POSIX system needed. You'll need to translate the 140k C source to assembler, time consuming but not impossible.
https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html ↗
This is the ultimate "test your backups and recovery" story. If we can't do this all modern technology is at risk.