Comment by scrollaway

If you hang out on HN long enough, it's easy to fool yourself into thinking that you need VCs to fund your startup and there's no way your business will survive without it.

Very important to remember that when you go into fundraising mode, you are dedicating a bunch of time to doing this, and that the time you will spend doing it is time you will not spend building your product or focusing on your customers.

200k is pre-seed level. When I raised a 500k pre-seed for my latest startup, I explicitly avoided VCs (too much effort), went only to angels. Pitching to them taught me what I should focus on, and when I understood the potential of what I was building (and saw the enthusiasm to go with it), I cut the fundraise short at 100k: No more time to waste, I had to build.

Also worth mentioning that constraints are good. Having too much cash to build your MVP is like having no deadline. A fire under your ass (in the form of bootstrapping) can force you to be creative and focus on immediate revenue.