When you take venture capital money, investors will shape everything from your strategy and product to your thought process.
That may not be best for what you’re offering, especially in the AI space, which is why I recommend bootstrapping your AI startup: You don’t have any other hands in the cookie jar.
Bootstrapping can serve as a competitive advantage in these times when capital is difficult to come by. Here are three aspects you should focus your attention on so you can build your startup without being beholden to anyone.
Build to solve a specific problem
Bootstrapping requires that you involve your clients when building your product roadmap. This is a great way to understand customers’ businesses, problems and blindspots, but it also serves a crucial purpose: It lets you target a specific issue.
Once you know the problem you need to solve, find out what your customers’ data capabilities are and whether they have the data to solve that issue. Then build in a user feedback loop so that you can test, train your AI to get smarter, and provide the desired output.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/03/how-to-bootstrap-an-ai-startup/