How to succeed in business without financing

Most people that start their first business think:  I need money to pay for all this stuff.

The reason being, they think about what a business looks like 3-5 years into operations.

As entrepreneurs, we have to understand that things start at a much smaller scale with what we call a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that you can create using the means and people you have on hand, and perhaps some funds you can gather from your own house, properties, friends and family.

In fact investors will very unlikely invest in a business that hasn't gone through this phase, where you can demonstrate you are motivated enough to go through these first thin and lean steps, and succeed at generating revenues that can scale.

Besides, 90% of business that succeed were never funded initially.  They may and likely were funded later on for growth, far beyond the first revenues have been generated. 

And these funds are raised at a time when its not needed for the survival of the business... which makes investors super comfortable providing funds to your business at a low % of equity or % of interest (depending if its equity financing (Angel or Venture Capital etc....) or debt financing (banks etc...)).

We are lucky today that nowadays, if we want to build an IT business, the costs are quite small

 

We can see here that for the same company that would cost $5M to get fully underway now costs less than $5k to get the same distance.

This is mostly because of the Open Source movement and concept as well as cloud connectivity and due to a bunch of software resources, engines that really make it easy for just about anyone to get things going without hiring programmers or building complex custom software really early on.

The key is to go intelligently, step by step, getting revenues as soon as possible, and scaling from there.

One important aspect even if you do have a step by step plan, is to find an advisor that has gone through the steps to success in your business type before so he or she can guide you in which steps to go through first, second, third and give you the right timing so your energies, efforts and money is expended in a smart way.  This is also super key.

I'm of course often available as a consultant to help people out in any way I can (just contact me, and ask)!

There is a lot more to it, but in a nutshell, this is the principle to get things done without early funding.  I talk a lot more about it and give direct business examples from my own experience  and a couple other examples in the video below:

Be well, and enjoy getting things started small, and the right way!