I went to a Fireside chat with a co-founder of a prominent e-commerce discount furniture site and they kept reiterating how scrappy they were for starting the company with less than $100k. Please, $100k is not scrappy. STFU.
7 answers from the community
Yea. Try starting a company for less than $100.
What does "starting" mean in this context? They took $100K in funding? Or they spent $100K to get to some discernible point X (first customer, profitability, etc)?
They had $100k to work with at launch to get going. At that point, I understood, they were bootstrapped.
Not every company can be started with little money. Businesses that involve inventory or manufacturing require enough credit to get the initial supply purchased or built.
Yes. And investors don't want to pay for inventory.
You can code an app with virtually no money, but an e-commerce takes a rather large initial investment.
I have done this. 100K don't mean shit when you have to make payroll. If you have one person on salary, 100K is easy street. Two, you start feeling some heat. Anybody else drawing a salary and you are officially on the ramen diet. It is absolutely insane how fast that money goes. It sounds like some dough, but 100K is <em>nothing</em>. Try having employees on 100K and call me a liar.