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You Don’t Need Investors or VC Funding to Get Started - DailyBlogTips

You Don’t Need Investors or VC Funding to Get Started - DailyBlogTips

You Don’t Need Investors or VC Funding to Get Started

Posted: 01 Feb 2013 05:16 AM PST

Whenever I talk to people who are trying to build a start up (be it a website, an online application or a mobile play) the conversation invariably gets channeled to “raising money”. That is, they start talking about why they need to raise money from investors and VCs, how they are going to do it, and what they are going to do with the money afterward.

My reaction is always the same one: “Are you sure you need that money right now, or even that it will help your startup?”

In my opinion, as you can see, raising money from investors and VCs is rarely the solution or even a necessary ingredient to a successful startup. Sometimes it can even be a problem.

Sure, you’ll need some money to get started, but for most startups we are talking about numbers between $5,000 and $50,000, and you should be able to raise that kind of money from your personal savings, family, friends and from the bank, all sources that won’t ask for a stake on your project.

On top of that getting venture capital early in the game has potential drawbacks. Here are three of them:

1. If you raise money too soon you’ll need to give up a large share of ownership, as investors will see a higher risk factor there. Should your startup succeed that ownership you gave away will amount to a lot of money.

2. By definition you can only focus on one thing at a time. If you spend time and energy looking for investors you’ll inevitably lose focus from your core product/service, and that is the worst thing you could do to your startup.

3. Sometimes when company raise a lot of money they become lazy, after all you have a big financial cushion. When money is short, on the other hand, people get creative and find new and better ways to do things, to acquire clients and so on.

If you are not convinced here’s empirical evidence: I was just reading an article on ZDNet, and I came across this interesting stat: out of all the startups that were acquired in 2012 (if they were acquired they probably were successful) 76% had not raised venture capital or private equity capital.

As you’ll agree, 76% is quite a high number. In my opinion it confirms that raising money too soon will not help you, and sometimes it will actually hinder your growth.

Bottom line: focus on acquiring clients and improving your product. When the time is right the money will come naturally, and in much better conditions.

Wanna make money with your website?

Original Post: You Don’t Need Investors or VC Funding to Get Started
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ProBlogger: Planning for the Year Ahead: My Approach on dPS and ProBlogger

ProBlogger: Planning for the Year Ahead: My Approach on dPS and ProBlogger

Link to @ProBlogger

Planning for the Year Ahead: My Approach on dPS and ProBlogger

Posted: 31 Jan 2013 05:06 AM PST

I’ve had a lot of questions about the process my team and I go through to plan for a new year of blogging on dPS and ProBlogger, so I’ve put together a bit of an explanation of what happened at our recent planning day:

Although we didn’t have a detailed agenda to work through on the day, our review of the blogs’ current position considered four main areas:

  1. Content: we looked at the publication rates and types of content, the feedback we got on certain posts, and more.
  2. Community: including comment quality, community signups, and so on.
  3. Stats: here, we considered traffic quality and quantity, visitor types, traffic sources, etc.
  4. Monetization: how are we doing, and what other possibilities are there that we could take advantage of?

As I explain in the video, through this review some common themes developed that helped us move into brainstorming ideas for 2013. These ideas really covered a lot of things—from content and community-building to monetization strategies and plans for the brands themselves.

This helped us actually begin to schedule things into the blog calendars for the year—product launches, events, and other activities.

One great advantage of planning 12 months in advance is that it allows us to set some goals, and define the steps we’ll take toward them that will help us generate some momentum with the blogs and our readers—momentum that should, we hope, help us achieve the goals we’d identified.

Delegating responsibilities for various tasks also helped give us a sense that we could actually achieve our dreams for the next 12 months.

The planning day also let us identify gaps in the schedule that would give us the opportunity to try new things—community initiatives, monetization approaches, and so on—or plan time for breaks for our team members to recharge.

I’d love to hear how you approach a new year of blogging. So once you’ve watched the video, do let us know your how you handle planning in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Planning for the Year Ahead: My Approach on dPS and ProBlogger
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