Your company can be like Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare and build an audience which, at some point, it will be able to monetize OR, with a different mindset and a bit of thinking outside the box, be a company that strives to make revenue from the start.

You can look for investors and outside money from the get go OR bootstrap your business with your own money and savings.

Depending on your objectives, maybe your only choice is to take outside money… But, by doing so, you create a strong dependency on funding, a false measure of wealth and add pressure and expectations on your business’ potential.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where your money comes from (well…), what matters is that you start making money early on to reduce outside pressures. Bootstrapping will force you to think about making money on Day One (Jason Fried) but, it’s just one way to get there…

Photo Credit: Hillary Manuel