When going with the bootstrapper route, you don’t have VC money to spend, but still need to eat food and pay rent.
There are alternative funding methods, like Calm Fund, but not all want to use them, and even when they do, they often need to already have some initial traction. So, the best option could be to get a fully remote startup job (if you don’t have one yet).
"Holding on to a job is the bootstrapper’s seed-round." – Anthony Castrio
But there can be a question about what your employer thinks about your startups on the side.
Many developers have told me that their company is not at all supportive. Some even forbid you from building side projects through their employment contract and say that everything you build – even outside work – belongs to them! (yes, I have worked in a company that had this in my contract too)
These stories together with my personal experience made me build a job board for those remote startups who not only are OK with you building your own side projects but even support and encourage you:
"At Giant Swarm we are 100% committed to upstream and we are big contributors to the Open Source community - as such, we fully encourage our employees to work on side projects. Furthermore, as we move towards the 4 day, 32 hour work week, we hope that this will free up more time for our employees to work on passion projects (:" – Joshua, HR
