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Bootstrapped on purpose: building TrackMy Tech without investors

· 6 min read · by Rahul Dhileep Kumar

TrackMy Tech is bootstrapped. What that means day to day, why it suits a founder who hates spending money, and the honest trade-offs: slower progress, our own money on the line, and hardware that stalls without funding.

An old black metal money box with a carry handle on the lid and a key in the lock

TrackMy Tech is bootstrapped. No investors. No term sheet framed on the wall. Just the founders, the product and a lot of jugaad.

Say "bootstrapped" and some people look at you as if you'd said you walk to work in the rain by choice.

So here's what bootstrapping actually means for us, why it suits the way I think about money, and what it costs. Because it does cost something. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a course.

An old black metal money box with a carry handle on the lid and a key in the lock

Image: 19th century money box by Prolete, CC0 1.0

What "bootstrapped" means here

TrackMy Tech Pvt Ltd is a sports-tech and SaaS company. We publish Track My Academy, software that sports academies use for attendance, fees, player reports and parent messages. I'm the Executive Director. Arichandran is Co-founder and Director.

Bootstrapped, for us, means one plain thing. The money that builds the company comes from the people who started it. Not from a fund.

That's it. No grand philosophy. It's a description of where the money comes from, not a badge.

Why it fits me

I'll be honest about my bias. I value money. I save. I hate mindless spending. Coupons, discounts, free trials: if it's free, I'm interested. My general rule is simple. If you can get it for free, why spend money on it?

The cheap route usually takes longer. I'd call it jugaad. It takes time, but it teaches you something along the way. Spending money has always felt more wrong to me than spending time.

That mindset shows up all over our history. When we were learning AI coding tools, we hunted down every free trial we could. Dozens of email accounts. A few friends' accounts too. It was less elegant than it sounds. It worked. (The full confession is in dozens of email accounts and zero shame.)

And when we did spend real money on the first build, it went badly. We paid an agency ₹50,000 for the first build of Track My Academy. It came back in PHP, looking like 2006. It was my co-founder's money, and I still call it the stupidest 50k. So I built it myself, with AI tools, over about three months. That story is in the app that arrived from 2006.

When money is tight, you're forced to learn the thing yourself. Painful. But you come out knowing how the thing works.

Default alive, the useful idea

The best framing I've read on this comes from Paul Graham. In Default Alive or Default Dead? (October 2015), he asks a blunt question. Assuming expenses stay constant and revenue keeps growing at its recent rate, will the company make it to profitability on the money it has left? If yes, it's default alive. If not, default dead.

He says half the founders he talks to don't know which one they are. He also has a line I'd stick on every founder's wall: "It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you." And: "you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A."

That's an essay written mostly for funded startups. But I think it applies even more to bootstrapped ones. There's no next round to save you. The arithmetic is the plan.

The calm-company argument

The loudest bootstrapping voices are probably 37signals, the company behind Basecamp. Their essay Profit motive puts the approach in one line: "Make more than you spend." They say they've been profitable every year they've been in business. They also say, a bit pointedly, "The tech industry is especially good at losing money."

Their book page for It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work says it plainly: "Anxiety isn't a prerequisite for progress." I like that idea. I'm writing this from an office with a chandelier made of Monster cans, so I'm not the best advertisement for calm. But I like the idea.

The trade-offs, honestly

Here's the part the motivational posts skip.

It's slower. You build what you can afford, in the order you can afford it. Features wait. Hiring waits. Sometimes sleep waits too.

It's your own money. Every rupee lost is one the founders put in. That changes how decisions feel. It's also why the ₹50,000 agency mistake still stings.

Hardware is brutal without funding. Software is cheap to iterate on. Hardware isn't. For about a year we worked on a smart football with sensors inside. We were promised funding by people we were working with. We spent more than ₹1 lakh of our own money on R&D, prototypes and a custom PCB. The promised funding never came. The project was paused, and it's still waiting: we have the prototype and the design files, and would pick it up again if funded. That's the eulogy in R.I.P. smart ball v1.

The lesson I took from it is a bit grim. Promised money isn't money. Plan as if it won't arrive, and be pleasantly surprised if it does.

The funding climate isn't helping anyone, either. According to Tracxn data reported by PTI, Indian tech startups raised $10.5 billion in 2025, 17% less than in 2024. Seed-stage funding fell 30%, to $1.1 billion. If you're early and waiting for a cheque, the queue got longer.

Bootstrapped until it isn't

I'm not saying funding is bad. For some companies, especially hardware, it's the only way the thing ever exists. And I'm not saying we'll never raise. I don't know what the future looks like.

Rob Walling put it in a way I find oddly comforting. On the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, discussing MicroConf's 2024 State of Independent SaaS report, he said: "You bootstrap until the money's available and if the money's never available, you just keep bootstrapping." The same episode notes that the share of surveyed founders planning to seek outside funding within 12 months fell from 30% to 23.5%.

That's roughly where I am. Bootstrapping is the default, not a waiting room. The product has to stand on its own: Track My Academy even has a free plan. If outside money ever turns up on terms that make sense, fine. Until then, we build with what we have.

It's slower. It's scarier. It teaches you a lot. Mostly about what you can do without.

FAQ

What does bootstrapped mean for a startup?

The company is funded by its founders and its own revenue rather than outside investors. You keep control and you keep the risk.

What is "default alive"?

Paul Graham's term for a startup that, on current expenses and growth, will reach profitability with the money it has. If it won't, it's "default dead".

Is bootstrapping harder for hardware?

In my experience, yes. Prototypes, components and manufacturing cost real money up front, and promised funding can disappear.

Sources

What next

How the ₹50,000 lesson happened: the app that arrived from 2006. How promised money vanished on a hardware project: R.I.P. smart ball v1.

Running an academy? Track My Academy handles attendance, fees, player reports and parent messages, and there's a free plan.