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Here's yet another suggestion for a definition from Hillel Cooperman of Jaskson Fish Market, a design software firm in Seattle:

Often, other people think that bootstrap means not taking venture or angel, and assume that it means you're investing your own money. To me bootstrapping a business means that the business funds itself by making money from day one.

Cooperman's definition is certainly in line with bootstrap guru Greg Gianforte's thoughts on the subject at Bootstrapping Your Business:

When you're Bootstrapping, you're forced to deal with customers and to fulfill their needs from Day One...Bootstrappers are forced to start selling immediately as a matter of survival, which means they become better at selling sooner than their venture-funded counterparts.

In fact, Gianforte phoned perspective customers for the prototype of his RightNow Technologies software before he even had a product. (See this article at Inc.com for more)

Still, I'm not sure bootstrapping can be confined to ideas that can make money immediately.

For example, LeadVine co-founder Allan Margate said in a recent interview with BootStrapMe.com that his company has focused on building community first and has not yet settled on a business model.

My own PostRanger.com project is in a similar place but I would argue both are bootstrapped.

• Margate internalized programming costs within his founding team making his only cost the domain name
• and I'm embarrassed to say how little I have spent on the basic infrastructure for PostRanger.

Bootstrapping means spending little or no money on startup and since you're often working a full-time job on the side, I think it's best not to abandon ship immediately if you don't have money coming in.

Concentrate on building a service people want and on finding the customer base that can support it. Before that, take no funding. You'll have nothing to pay back if it turns out you're wrong.