Part of the bootstrapping mystique as suggested by startup evangelist Greg Gianforte is not having to wait for that investment money to get your venture rolling.

If you go the Bootstrapping route, you can start your business immediately. Immediately! If you want to pursue external funding, on the other hand, you can't start your business until everyone else tells you it's OK. Venture capital firms might take up to a year or more to decide on whether to invest. They might want a 200-page business plan.

Of course, choosing the business that allows this approach is the trick.

When picking a business to bootstrap, here are some suggestions. Some of them we've mentioned before. All are critical:

1. Choose a business you can start today. This may seem obvious but, when considering a business startup, if there are too many steps to take before you can get your business started, it's probably the wrong business.
2. Choose an idea that is scalable. Even though you've got to start with something you can get under way using your own resources immediately it's also got to be something that can grow. Remember, discovering you can make $300 a month from Google Ads on a website is no good if it takes all your time to maintain the site and there's never a growth in revenue.
3. Live for the moment but map out the future. One of the ways to make your idea scalable is to take your initial idea, the one you can start today, and try to imagine what you could do with it in six months, in one year in two. Also working backwards, you might take a bigger idea, one that you can't exactly start today, break it into pieces and find a piece you can start immediately.
4. Make sure you have customers. I've defended the idea of way out ideas before and still believe they can work. But I also believe it's important to find what Seth Godin calls an Otaku, a group passionate about a product who will spread the word making marketing an easier job. You may not have money for an advertising campaign. Finding a small passionate group for your product will help you widen your market and scale your business without many resources.
5. Choose a money maker. If you plan to spend time on this business there has to be a payoff. Trust me. It will be a huge mistake to select a business that can't develop some kind of cash flow from day one. It will be better motivation for you and easier to explain to your significant other about the amount of time your spending.