You'd be surprised with how easy this is to do without making any major changes to ones lifestyle. A bit over a year ago I quit my relatively high paying job with $1k in savings, moved to the midwest, and I've been living comfortably on around $15k/yr (I'm taking the luxury of removing my student loan payments from the equation). I don't own a car, live in an inexpensive house thats shared with a few other entrepreneurs in a similar situation, I stay reasonably frugal, and share many expenses.
We all work out of an incubator that provides us with free office space (wouldn't significantly affect our numbers if we had to pay).
Bootstrapping in the midwest has worked quite well for me, but there's certainly disadvantages. For one, a lot of the local investment capital is old money. Old money that is extremely conservative with their investments. If we ended up receiving capital, we'd likely be forced to move to a more expensive city largely because of proximity to the investor and more importantly for skilled labor. The good developers all tend to flock to SF or NYC where the pay is high. They still exist in the midwest, but you really need to hunt to find them.
I'm an advocate for the midwest, there's challenges, some of which your concept may alleviate, but IMO it's perfect for bootstrapping a small team.
We all work out of an incubator that provides us with free office space (wouldn't significantly affect our numbers if we had to pay).
Bootstrapping in the midwest has worked quite well for me, but there's certainly disadvantages. For one, a lot of the local investment capital is old money. Old money that is extremely conservative with their investments. If we ended up receiving capital, we'd likely be forced to move to a more expensive city largely because of proximity to the investor and more importantly for skilled labor. The good developers all tend to flock to SF or NYC where the pay is high. They still exist in the midwest, but you really need to hunt to find them.
I'm an advocate for the midwest, there's challenges, some of which your concept may alleviate, but IMO it's perfect for bootstrapping a small team.