I’ve bootstrapped a few startups by selling first to people already in my network. Friends either became early customers or introduced me to someone who might have the problem I was solving. From there, I focused on making the offer difficult to refuse: price it fairly, promise something concrete, and overdeliver.

I also tried to set the deal size high enough to fund more than the bare minimum needed to complete the work. That gave me room to improve the product rather than simply survive from one sale to the next.

Sometimes the first revenue does not come directly from the core product. It can come from related activities such as events, training, online courses, consulting, or agency work. Those can finance the startup and help you understand the customer, but agency work is particularly risky because it is easy to become trapped delivering custom projects instead of building the product.

You build slowly, and make sure that every business transaction is profitable.

This is the exact opposite of VC-funded where they build fast and don't care if they are burning their runway down because they either grow fast enough to make up for it later.... or they don't and they shutdown.

Most "startup school" style content assumes the VC path, so there is rarely even any talk about having a core profitable transaction at the heart of your business model, but truly, that is the key to bootstrapping.