You can find plenty of survival manuals for when you are lost in the woods or on a desert island that explain what types of plants are poisonous vs. edible, how to build a shelter, and how important it is to have fresh water. The bootstrapper is luckily a few rungs up, although sadly not very many rungs up on Maslov's heirarchy of need from the poor shmuck marooned on a desert island. Please watch Survivor to cheer yourself up when things are looking particularly bleak. The venture financed start-ups like to watch bootstrappers when their worlds get bleak but we don't have our own reality TV program yet.

While I don't have the time at the moment to write a comprehenive guide of survival tips for the struggling bootstrapper here are some bare essentials as you get started and I'll try to add more in subsequent entries.

Some tips before you start the journey...

Pride tastes good. Get used to swallowing it

You will soon find yourself in plenty of situations asking your network of friends, family, and peers for help either directly financially or otherwise. These people can help you and your venture survive. It can be tough to ask for an investment or a favor but the same pride that makes you wary to do this is the stuff that makes you confident that you will succeed.

Layoffs and unemployment can be your first investors

If you are lucky enough to have a job then keep in mind that being forcefully removed from your job is a good thing financially for you. I am not advocating any actions out of the movie Office Space but a good time to start a new bootstrap company is when you have a check coming from somewhere but you don't need to work.

Unemployment pays about $528 per week (or at least that is what they paid me) for 10 months or until you are making enough money to pay yourself what you need to eat that ramen soup. So you can seek $20,000 in investment or just go on the dole for 10 months. Uncle Sam wants you to start a company to create new jobs and increase the overall employment rate in the USA. It's good for the economy. Layoffs aren't as reliable as your Uncle Sam but they can provide a nice cushion on your way out the door from your last full time gig. Six to Eight weeks pay can tack some time onto your runway before needing outside capital.

Take stuff from your last job

I don't mean that you should steal office supplies but a good bootstrapper takes what they can from the resources that they have. The things you can take from your job ethically include your contacts and relationships, knowledge, and other things you can buy cheap. Employers have to get rid of things like that old laptop that you have been using. You can offer to buy back products you have been using from them at very low prices and they may be perfectly happy to do so. If they chucked you in a lay-off then they may have a lot of equipment they need to get rid of before closing the office in Chicago, etc. and someone who is willing to pay $100 per computer could be a welcome way to dispose of the hardware they don't need.

License stuff from your last job

A more interesting set of things that I have seen people take from their former employer is intellectual property and products that the company didn't have any reason to bring to market. So imagine that someone builds a very fancy custom software solution internally for a hardware manufacturer to configure their products. The hardware manufacturer can only use it but a good entrepreneur can sell it to other manufacturers. Similarly in a research laboratory they can only take technology so far before it needs to be commercialized. Every university and big company has a TLO, technology licensing office, where you can buy your inventions and even other people's inventions for a percentage of revenue in future earnings of your venture. So before doing tons of R&D you may be able to get a product that has already been funded to the tune of $1,000,000 or more before you start if you are willing to pass back royalties and give back some ownership to the folks at your last job. But consider the license back to be your investment capital.

Contract back to your last job or at least contract somewhere

It is amazing how people at your former job can't get their work done without you once you are gone. If this is not true you may not want to become a bootstrapper. I have a friend who became fully employed as a contractor at three times his salary and then could 2/3 of his time doing start-up work. If the last job isn't an option then doing high end contract work part-time is a good way to avoid raising capital. In my current start-up's case, Viapoint, we are doing datamart consulting for a healthcare company while our product business, which has yet to generate much revenue, is the main marketing and development push we do. The consulting work pays over $100 per hour which leaves us with three days free to work on the product. The contract work also helps to provide clarity regarding what people are actually willing to pay for. If we can't make it with our consumer desktop organizer product we can always fall back on creating a health care datamart product.

Get a free space to operate

Commercial office space rent is expensive and you may not need to pay for it until you are in growth mode. The first free zone you have is your own living space. The world is flat, nobody cares where you are operating as long as you show up to the meetings in the right dress code. But if you want to avoid having the baby crying in the background while one conference calls, other than giving the baby a pacifier, find someone with open office space. Now in my case the people who have had open office space for my first venture were my parents and my current venture is one of my partner's parents. I can't generalize this too much but your relatives may own property that is suitable for you to operate a small start-up business in. I like the deals we cut with our parents because they have lots of incentives to not charge rent to us. Among them is the fact that I'll probably get some inheritance sooner or later and this is a double dip tax avoidance strategy for them. They can write-off the lost revenue in the rental property and don't have as much inheritance tax to pay in transferring the value of the asset.

But most people's parents don't have office space so the other options are to find people desperate for someone to occupy their office space, cheap sub-lets in big company buildings where they are stuck with an inflexible lease due to the bubble, borrowing space at a university, change your residence to rent a place with a bed and shower, working from a desktop while at a contract job. One friend of mine is convinced you can live in a geodesic dome tent on the roof of an office building since it is wasted space. If you are a good bootstrapper you will find the cheap space to operate in.

That's about it for today. Good luck.