You know how it is when you start reading one thing on the Web, become engaged, then, like following a trail of crumbs, it leads you into a whole different experience?

Well, that is what I did when I got intrigued reading about a new blog, Netsetter , about online entrepreneurs dubbed here  “the net setters”,  remniscent of the old,  jaded term, the jet setters.  I pretty much got hooked when I stumbled upon the author/creator’s bootstrapping experience. More on that in a minute.  First, let me tell  about my discovery of a site, which I plan to use and you may want to use as well ,which offers tools and resources for “net setters”. It’s Envato, a digital goods marketplace and from there you can find, FlashDen ,a  community of buyers and sellers of stock Adobe Flash components; FlashDen’s sister site AudioJungle, which has branched into music tracks, loops and sound effects.  And you can also find:

• ThemeForest – a marketplace for buying and selling site templates and CMS themes
• VideoHive – a marketplace for buying and selling stock footage, motion graphics and video project files.
• GraphicRiver – a marketplace for buying and selling layered photoshop, vectors, icons and add-ons.

Now, the back story. I am always drawn to stories of entrepreneurs who bootstrap their way to glory.  I’ve bootstrapped businesses many times and I also like to share these stories because I think they show the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re in the tough midst of a bootstrapping experience  yourself.  The founder of Envato and also Netsetter is a fellow named Collis.  He has the archetypal bootstrapping story.  I’ll let him tell it:

“..Having no money is pretty much the ultimate constraint a startup can be under, and for most bootstrappers that’s not far from how they have to operate.

Having nothing forces you to figure out a way to bring in some income – any income – and to do so fast. It forces you to work out how to do things in the cheapest way possible. It forces you to really, truly evaluate what is necessary in your business and what is simply deadweight.

When my wife and I cofounded Envato, we did so while working a freelance business where invoices always got paid late and cash flow was erratic. We started out with some modest savings in the bank but by the time our first site was up, we were thirty thousand in debt, I had worked for four months without a day off, lived for two of those months with my in-laws to save money and still there was no sign of a reprieve.

Because we spent everything we had, and then some, on building our website we were forced into a series of practices that made our business ultimately viable. We had no revenue, so none of the three founders could quit our jobs – we just started working one in the day, and one in the evening. We had no money so we couldn’t hire anyone beyond our one valiantly underpaid freelance developer, so every job had to be done by one of us – regardless of whether we knew how to do it. We had no advertising budget so we had to embark on a series of guerrilla marketing strategies trading time and ingenuity for money. We had no content on the site and no users, so we made a whole heap ourselves and invited, cajoled, persuaded and begged people to test it out.

In short we saved and scrimped, worked in odd hours and off hours, used our lack of income as a motivator to find revenue quickly and basically did it tough. Nobody saw a pay cheque for the first year, and even today after two and a half years when we have a staff of twenty something, I’m proud to say that all the management team and founders still get paid far less than the top authors on our sites.

Under the umbrella of Envato. we’ve build digital goods marketplaces like FlashDen and ThemeForest, a chain of successful tutorial blogs at Tuts+, a popular freelancing community at FreelanceSwitch, some successful ebooks at Rockable Press and lots of other projects!”

Well, there you have it.  That’s how bootstrapping is done.  And Collis has done all this since 2006.  Pretty impressive!  Congrats!