First things first, congratulations! You’ve taken the leap and built the foundations for your revolutionary idea you think consumers are going to love! However, you’ve probably reached a bottleneck. You need money to grow your idea into a profitable business. Getting money is hard for anyone. It’s even harder to get people to invest in a fledgling startup. Luckily for you, we’re going to go through some ways you can get funding for your startup in this article. If this sounds interesting, keep on reading.
1. Small Business Grant
Depending on what state you’re in, you may qualify for a small business grant providing you meet the qualifying criteria. Since this is a grant, you won’t be expected to pay a cent back. There are also some federal small business grants available too. These are a great way to get off the ground with the government’s help without needing to sign equity agreements like you would with certain investor relationships.
2. Crowdfunding
In recent years crowdfunding has been used for a plethora of things. There are even crowdfunding websites out there that are dedicated to startups, so get looking! Crowdfunding can also be a good indicator as to how much potential the general public and small-time investors see in your product or service. Some investor crowdfunding services do expect you to give dividends or equity to investors, so do be warned that this may happen before you look into it. The public based crowdfunding services normally only expect you to give rewards to certain tier levels. These rewards are set by you so you can have peace of mind knowing you’re only giving something in return that you can actually afford to give away.
3. Peer-to-Peer Loans
Many large banks don’t like to take risks on startups since they’re so volatile. Instead, you could get a peer-to-peer loan, which is where you’re connected through a middleman service to groups of investors looking to put money into new startups. This is normally in the form of unsecured business loans.
4. Venture Capital
Venture Capitalists/Studios are people or organizations who will give startups money, expertise, and connections in return for things like board seats when the company goes public as well as an equity share. Compared to most other forms of startup investing, this can be a goldmine for new businesses. The best way to find venture studios is to look them up online. We’re located here in LA, so we’d search LA venture studio, and we’d find relevant studios in our area.
5. Family and Friends
The good old bank of mom and dad can still be a valuable resource for a startup. Even your friends can be too. This can, of course, be risky if things go wrong with your startup, personal relationships could be affected. The good thing about financial help from family and friends is that they normally don’t want much return, and if they do want a return, then it’s much more favorable to you than it would be with a bank, for example.
Conclusion
As you can probably tell by now, getting a startup off the ground and into a growth phase can be hard. If it was easy, then everybody would do it, wouldn’t they? There are many ways to acquire funding, as explained in this article. You can either look to the government for a small grant, get crowdfunding (Public or investor-based), get a peer-to-peer loan, get investment from a venture capitalist or venture capital studio, and finally, you could just turn to your parents or trusted friends. We hope this article helped you, and we wish you the best of luck with your startup!