Bootstrapping forces you have to ship fast, launch small, and get real feedback early. You simply cannot spend 6 months or a year building in the dark and hoping for a perfect (expensive) big launch. When we were finding the first 1000 users for @TallyForms , we didn’t optimize for MRR growth. We focused on hyper-targeted (cold) outreach to get feedback from the right early adopters. The people who loved what we were building even in its earliest form. For us those were founders, product teams and @IndieHackers. Those early believers helped us refine, iterate, and build something that resonates. We asked feedback to thousands of people manually for 8 months and invited them to our Slack. Those conversations shaped the product far more than any big launch could have. And optimizing for them turned them into our biggest ambassadors.