I nominated us for Best Boot Strapped company for The Crunchies (an award ceremony run by TechCrunch). I’m not sure we are a bootstrapped company, but I’d still appreciate it if you nominated us as well:

Are we a bootstrapped company? The TechCrunch criteria is that we took less than $100k in investment. That’s true–we didn’t take any investment. The first half of this year was funded by me doing consulting work. I wrote a book, did some corporate training, wrote some articles for Salesforce, and recorded a screencast. It definitely felt like bootstrapping.

However, since August we’ve been entirely funded by our customers. Some companies think of this as a bootstrapping technique. I think of it as a business model. I don’t think we’re a bootstrapped company anymore–I think we’re a small business. (But please, don’t let that stop you from voting for us above)

It’s not just semantics to me, and it probably shouldn’t be to our customers. I meet a lot of people who call themselves founders and call their companies startups. Founder puts all the value on having the idea rather than on executing or finishing. Startup tells you how long they plan to be around, at the start but not down the road when you need them. I’d rather call myself owner and my company a business.

Related Posts:

• One Year With Jay
• CrowdVine in the New York Times
• Introducing Jay