Think for a moment that you did get started with a million dollar or more in funding right at the stage when your product is just on paper, at a concept level. What will be the first thing that you will do with that money?
Get a nice office space with a neat little cabin and thinking rooms for product ideation; work on a plan to scale big nationally or globally; recruit teams that will take care of product conceptualization, development, marketing, sales, customer service, etc; allocate money towards media channels for marketing and development of collaterals; hire a research company to help with customer research; and I’m sure there’re a whole lot more important things to spend on to get your business up and running.
These are just fluff and you do not need any of these on day one. Most of them would not be needed for a long time even after launching your product.
When you’ve got a whole lot of money to start playing around with before your product is even developed, entrepreneurs tend to make far more mistakes and end up creating a mediocre product. Take for instance, hiring a market research company. The real market research happens when your customers actually use your product (or a minimum viable one) and give you first hand feedback.
On the other hand, if you have very little money to begin with, you tend to focus on making far fewer mistakes. You’ve got very little room to play with and have to get your product working and accepted right at the beginning. You don’t have the leeway to create a whole lot of crappy product versions or prototypes, you’ve got to get it right with as few versions, possibly in the first two!
You think harder and tend more to innovate on how to sell and market your product; you create guerilla-marketing tactics.
In a nutshell, little money makes you innovate and thus create avenues that get you bigger results for your efforts.
That’s the route to creating successful products so do not fret if you do not have money to start your business. That’s in fact the best way to start a venture so go ahead and figure out how best can you use your available resources to launch your product.
Google, Microsoft, Virgin, Apple, Facebook, and just about every other successful venture did not start with a million dollars in funding. Here’s your cue!
Here’s a link to my latest article that was published in Forbes: 4 Steps To Master The ‘Art’ of Sales.
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