How much sweat equity to financial equity? Different business activities lend to one style easier then the other love your opinions

So bootstrapping is a minimalist approach to financing a business and requires a larger amount of sweat equity compared to the money put in. So when do you find that the sweat part has gone too far compared to the dollars being spent to move the needle?

Obviously there is a minimum amount of advertising that needs to be done to communicate to get the interest in your product or service, need a place to work, some type of accounting, some type of store front, sales etc… Some of these activities don’t lend themselves to well to the sweat alone.

Right now I’m still in product development stage with a cash investment of less than 2k. That includes the web, development tools, some graphics and PC. In the next couple months plan on getting to release of the product and so want to generate interest.

Thoughts on how I should think through what to budget out to keep my financial risks at this point still low until my business hypothesis proves out and what I should think as sweat equity friendly?

Depending on your product/service, you may be able to generate sufficient buzz to drive traffic and sales with mostly sweat equity. Social network marketing can be great for this. Do this in coordination with a sound search engine optimization strategy and you can generate sales relatively inexpensively (from a financial perspective). Just will take hard work and creativity.

If you want some specific tips, I'd be happy to talk to ya, just hard to give specifics without knowing your product/website.