I've recently come out the back of a 5 year bootstrapped journey. When I say bootstrapped, I mean very bootstrapped. No pot of savings to live on, many months without pay.
If I had to summarise it, your opportunity for success is directly proportional to your belief in yourself to succeed in an environment that you see almost no way forward.
Of course, you still have the usual killers such as product market fit, cash-flow, etc.
Incredibly empowering, incredibly stressful, not for the faint hearted. Loved every day of it.
Preparing to embark on another journey, this one won't be bootstrapped (not purposefully anyway :D).
It started as a B2C navigation app, went through various small and large pivots over it's lifetime (we ended up also launched a B2B SaaS platform)— it was mostly a crowdsourced data angle.
I'm still really trying to formulate the next adventure, I've half started things in the Bitcoin space, but yet uncommitted fully. So still working on the full concept