Starting a company can be a challenge, but take these easy steps and you can navigate the turbulent winds
While applying for and obtaining grants is great, the process of getting your company financially stable and able to apply for grants can be troublesome itself.
Bootstrapping your company means funding the company from your own pocket, be it self-investment, product revenue generation, or crowd funding. One might think bootstrapping is an old fashioned way of investing in your company. However, in the long run bootstrapping your company has several advantages:
- Any revenue you produce will have no strings attached.
- Self revenue and promotion will lower the equity requested by potential investors.
- Bootstrapping lets you test the market to see if your idea makes sense before going all in.
With these factors in mind I will present to you the steps to bootstrap your company from start to finish:
- Identify what makes your idea special
- Who is the market
- How are you doing things differently
- What technologies are you investing your time in that other people cannot easily replicate
- You need an implementation challenge that you are solving with some novelty, not an idea that simply needs man hours to solve. People with more money can solve man hours problems more easily.
- Get some qualified workers to help, ie PhDs, professors, experienced workers
- Make sure you know the state of the art in your field, and that you are using that technology, i.e. AI, or video codecs, or search optimization algorithms, server allocation, etc
- Refine your product
- Develop a MVP
- Develop a demo
- There are companies that aid you in the initial setup process
- Goto Pitch Competitions to both promote your product and win $10-20k in free money (Agri-tech, CIX, Invest Ottawa, Communitech, Invest Ontario, Collision, VentureLab, etc)
- https://www.foundersbeta.com/startup-competitions/
- https://thefounderspress.com/startup-competitions
- You can practice pitching at events such as Startup Investor Drinks
- Leverage the Pitch Competition success to network and build connections with companies
- Some of these companies will hook you up with their investors, which will save you money and time.
- If you still cannot get investors, you can talk to Angel investors, there are many groups in the GTA that do this and talk to companies all the time (Angel Investors Ontario, etc).
- Leverage your pitch competition success to reduce equity that they request. They will request high equity, but they will fund risky projects.
- You can also talk to Accelerators and Incubators which will offer ~50k and take 15% equity but provide you with their design support. (MARS, YComb, Creative Destruction Labs, etc) https://www.failory.com/startups/ontario-accelerators-incubators
- Once you have some seed money, start applying for grants to reduce your costs by 50-75%
- Once you have traction, venture capitalists will agree to fund you. Repeat Step 6 and 7 multiple times.
I recommend that you start incorporating your company in Canada as soon as possible. It will cost ~$1000, after incorporation and changing the business name, but its best to have it setup sooner than later. Additionally, setting up a business chequing account and visa will facilitate payroll and storing those investments and grants that you worked so hard for.
For more information, please contact:
info@sredsolutions.com