I also had these thoughts when I bootstrapped but the problem is not being able to hire a great team that can build something you would not be able to. If you’re all 3 single guys in 20s, enjoy 20s. When you’re married and have kids, then you’ll care about bills rather than lifestyle and retreats.
Depends how much you're making as a bootstrapper? If $10 or 15k a month isn't able to fund your lifestyle then you'll probably have problems later in life. Also, unless you're based in the Bay area / NYC / London, hiring people generally won't cost you $10k/mo per employee.
Also, no one says you can't sell your bootstrapped business. A project generating $30k in profit can generally be sold for $1-1.3m. Reinvest that, and you suddenly have great cash flow from investments in addition to any other income you manage to make from your next project.
All in all, a path worth taking in life if you want flexibility and freedom.
You can definitely make over $1m a year running a bootstrapped business. On the high end of the success scale you can walk away with more money than a successful VC backed co-founder.
There are more businesses that are totally inappropriate for VC than should take VC money. The problem is everyone is equating tech businesses with VC. There are plenty of dead tech startups that actually have modest economics and would have worked if VC, and the high expenses of the top tier US talent, had been avoided.
Another note, something I’ve learned more recently. Some businesses won’t make more money even if you force more capital in to them. You can end up with a really good company that can be profitable for decades, but destroy it by force feeding it outside capital (VC or other.) It is important to identify this early.
