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A steady cash flow remains crucial to the bootstrapping method since bootstrapping entrepreneurs use cash flow to grow their business instead of outside investment.

As blogger and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki observes:

Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.

Rather than spend a projected $1 million quoted to him by both Microsoft and Oracle for construction of a database to manage the increasing influx of orders for online services at his company, Field had an employee build a miniature model on Microsoft Access.

The system has steadily grown in complexity as the business evolves and today has been valued at $20 million.

Field believes in the end he got a more flexible application than any multi-million dollar system installed all at once could ever have been.

"Because we did it little by little, I got what I wanted," he said.

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