3 seed success stories to inspire your entrepreneurial journey

The opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Bootstrap is a term used to describe a scenario in which an entrepreneur launches a business with minimal capital and no outside funding. When a person tries to start and grow a business with their own money or the operating profits of the new business, they are said to be starting.

When an entrepreneur starts a business, they start with little or no start-up funds. The opposite of bootstrapping is when a businessman raises funds from venture capitalists or before launching his business. To succeed without outside investment, start-ups rely on personal funds, rapid inventory turnover, equity, a good cash trail, and streamlined operations. A business that relies on seeding, for example, can run a kickstarter campaign or pre-orders for their product, then use the funds raised from the pre-orders to create and deliver their product.

Related: 3 Great Reasons to Start Your Business

Compared to a business using angel investments, starting your business can be advantageous because it gives the entrepreneur full control over all decisions related to their business. There are hundreds of bootstraps. From large, well-known companies to small businesses, getting started can lead to great success. Let's take a look at three startup success stories and how they made their businesses successful on their own:

You've probably never heard of the Mojang company, but we know you've definitely heard of the best-selling video game of all time that Markus Persson and his company, Mojang, created a while ago. just over ten years old: Minecraft.

When Persson first released Minecraft under the Mojang brand, he opted to sell it directly through the Minecraft website, rather than seeking outside investors, so Mojang could collect all the profits. Within a year, Minecraft had sold so many copies that Persson was able to quit his own and devote all of his time to Mojang's fledgling business.

Eventually other employees joined the company to help expand the base of Minecraft, and as it expanded it grew to encompass new consoles, and therefore, more homes worldwide. Soon, Minecraft products - such as clothing and toys like LEGO sporting Minecraft characters - flooded the market, and Mojang grew from a small game company to a giant.

Persson and his company turned down numerous offers from potential investors, including Napster co-founder Sean Parker, and refused to accept outside funding to continue developing Mojang. However, Mojang's meteoric growth eventually took its toll on Persson, and in 2014 he sent out a tweet that simply read, "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can get on with my life?" p>

And as we know, someone accepted that offer. In September 2014, just three months after Perrson's tweet, Microsoft bought Mojang from Persson for $2.5 billion.

Related: What I wish I had known before starting my startup

It was 1998, and Sara Blakely was a saleswoman and went door to door selling fax machines. One morning, as she was getting ready for another long day of sales, she cut off the feet of a pair of shaping tights and put them on under her pants. That's when the idea of ​​Spanx hit her. The shaping and toning the control top tights gave her was perfect, and it made her realize that the stockings were sheer enough to make shapewear.

At the time, Blakely was just 27, with just $5,000 in his savings account. She invested every penny of her savings to create her Spanx products and even went so far as to write her own patent in an effort to save money.

She introduced her Spanx products to a number of different retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale's, and convinced them to carry her line of shapewear.

To this day, Blakely is still the only pro...