How to Get Funding for a Startup

Product design, prototyping, customer segmentation, marketing strategy, marketing campaigns, manufacturing and distribution channel design, communications design, management strategy and design, and so much more. You may know your stuff when it comes to what you do as a small business owner, but no one can know all there is to know about all of these things. But these are the things that an investor wants to see.

My job as a business strategy, likewise, is not to know all of these things, but knowing they are needed and how to align them in the most cost effective and efficient way possible. This is what a business strategist does - align the business concept with the market and funding.

So I know what you're first reaction is; I can't afford all of those parts. This is where we provide the value you need. Most of our work involves preventing you from wasting money and, instead, investing money where it's needed. This is bootstrapping at any level. We're huge fans of bootstrapping and so are investors.

Check out our short article about BOOTSTRAPPING here.

My favorite examples of large scale bootstrapping involve a Soy Milk producer and the never too old story of how VHS beat Betamax to the market.

Looking at soy first, the milk industry actually sued the makers of a popular soy milk for using the word milk in the label and causing confusion with the customer. The suit was settled when the Milk industry agreed to distribute Soy Milk. This provided additional income for dairy distributors, allowed them to hedge their bets should soy replace milk, and gave Soy Milk folks a bonanza of not having to develop and maintain distribution and marketing channels.

Likewise, my personal project, Kronicity, a research tool that allows users to easily collect and associate data from any device, was faced with very large costs for content, marketing, and distribution in academia. My solution was to make it free for all educators along with revenue potential for teachers and professors. I saved a ton of cash and will launch months earlier than expected.

As for VHS, they faced a competitor in BetaMax that was backed by industry tech giant SONY that developed the Betamax nearly two years earlier. VHS countered with a product that allowed recording of movies 2 hours long (betamax bet on hour long television recording preferences for the consumer), and more significantly through an agreement with Blockbuster video to provide movies, marketing and distribution. The customer naturally gravitated to the machines that played all those Blockbuster movies. JVC used business strategy to collaborate the pants off of SONY.

In most cases, going it alone, spending the long dollar to reinvent the wheel, more accurately the distribution, marketing and manufacturing channels is a waste of precious time and money. You can get to market a lot quicker and for a lot less than what you thought through a good strategy that involves a few collaborators. Create and execute a plan like this and you're much more likely to launch with the cash you have and attract investors to grow to the next level.

For another example of really well spent money, consider our next post: "How Can I Reduce Development Costs".