This book is about you! It’s about giving you the motivation and the guidance you need to start your own business without having to raise millions in venture capital. It’s about giving you the confidence that you can succeed with your ideas by showing you how others, just like you, did it. It’s about showing you what business models have been proven successful by bootstrapping and to help you identify how to find your own ideas for a business. I have researched thousands of startups. I’m intrigued to learn how they did it and more importantly, how more people like you can follow in their success. Bootstrapped shares the stories of a carefully selected 75 startups and entrepreneurs from a variety of industries and backgrounds. While we often read about the Facebook’s and Google’s of the world, the vast majority (i.e. the 99+ %) of startups never raise any venture capital and yet they find ways to become profitable and succeed all the while getting to maintain complete control of their companies. Bootstrapped uncovers these hidden stories to show you that it’s all possible. The media and to an extent, our society, provide a false perception that in order to successfully start a business, you need to raise a lot of money. While this may be true for a small percentage of companies (i.e., the 1%) that require millions in startup capital to grow to $Billion companies, it is untrue for more than 99% of successful startups. In Bootstrapped, you will learn not only how these savvy entrepreneurs bootstrapped their businesses, but you’ll also learn how they came up with their ideas, the steps they took to transform their ideas into a business, and how they ultimately built and scaled their businesses to success. Let’s face it, most of us want to start our own business, but we often don’t know where to start. In fact, just getting started is the BIGGEST reason why most of us never do it