When thinking about bootstrapping a company, supporters and critics of the process alike seem to focus on the shoestring startup.

Doing things on the cheap can certainly be part of the earliest stages of a bootstrap business, but it is not the defining aspect of the entire venture process.

Indeed, few bootstrap entrepreneurs would dream of refusing to reinvest at least some of the proceeds of their effort to continue to grow the business for the future and even outside investment might be appropriate when the time is right.

Here from my own experiences with a new bootstrap startup, the social blogging community PostRanger.com, are at least five stages I have already seen or expect to see as I grow my new venture.

Your experiences may be similar or may contain some slight variations.

1. Start with nothing-The classic bootstrapper beginning, of course. But truthfully, many bootstrappers start with some personal assets or borrowed money from family to get them going. I started this blog with nothing but convinced Creative Weblogging to take me on after auditioning with a business idea blog of my own launched for free on Blogger. Another blog created to chronicle the brainstorming phase of the PostRanger startup, and a site where I experimented with revenue generation and some of the interactive qualities that would become the essence of PostRanger, were launched on WordPress and were also free.

2. Generate cash-Though neither BootStrapMe nor my wordpress family of blogs had anything to do with PostRanger, they did generate revenue and knowing that I would need a more sophisticated network than I could get from a free platform, I decided re-investment of at least part of that revenue would be needed.

3. Re-invest- This site and n10ah generated enough revenue to allow investment of $150 into launch of the current PostRanger network on TypePad. The sites generated more than that, in fact, but $150 was all I needed to invest at the time and so, in true bootstrapper fashion I limited my risk by investing only what was needed and nothing more.

4. Plan for growth-In the future, I will likely need more money for growth including probably programming to make the site more user friendly. This may include creating an automatic guest author sign-up to make PostRanger more accessible. We may also be assembling a book (likely to be offered on the network), a guide explaining in more detail how to use PostRanger to its full potential

5. Fund or sell-In the distant future, I expect the business may either require more traditional financing for growth or could be sold to another larger company. In either scenario, I believe that we will have the business model in place and fairly accurate revenue projections based on past performance.

If you've got any of your own experiences to share on aspects of the stages of bootstrap startup please ad them below. Or e-mail me and we could make it the subject of a future post.