I'm 44. I've bootstrapped a company, raised $50M+, sold to PE, and now own manufacturing facilities across North America. If I was 25 again building my first brand, here's what I'd tell myself. 1. Bootstrap. 99% of the time. Don't raise money. Bootstrap all day every day in consumer. There's rarely an instance where you should raise outside capital. Most of my pain over the last eight years running this business has been because I have investors. I would never do that again knowing what I know now. 2. Competing incentives will break you. There's so much brain damage running a company when you have other people involved. Founders and investors can very easily have competing incentives and interests. You think you're aligned, but over time they become disjointed. They have their own set of incentives that you hope are aligned with yours. Often they're not. 3. The 1% exception. The only time raising makes sense is when you need heavy capex. Building factories. Deep R&D like Lomi where research and development is super cash intensive. That's why we did it. Otherwise, the downside to raising money in consumer is much higher than the upside. 4. The hard part of bootstrapping. The downside to bootstrapping in consumer is cash/working capital sucks. Even if your business is profitable, a lot of your growth gets financed from cash flows. You don't make a lot of money personally because so much gets cycled back into inventory and working capital. Consumer is not a great place for outside capital. There are very few cases where it makes sense. Build lean. Stay in control. Go for positive cash flows over everything else.