At some point, entrepreneurs were sold a lie, that raising capital is a necessary part of starting a company. I started MyBlogLog in March of 2005 and sold it for $12M less than two years later, without taking a lick of capital. This is how.
I was working on a different company for the first year. That job paid my bills and honestly didn't take more than 20 hours of my time. All the time that was left over went to MyBlogLog.
LESSON LEARNED: Salary from another job is excellent non-dilutive investment.
I reached out to my best Todd Sampson, who ran a software development shop, and told him what I wanted to build. Within a couple of days we had a prototype and within the first couple of weeks, we had a product in market.
LESSON LEARNED: Sell your vision to your network. Co-founders will dilute you, but they don't cost any money to start. Fair trade.
We quickly identified a couple of key markets: tech blogs like Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb, VC bloggers like Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, and GTD bloggers, like Merlin Mann. I relentlessly emailed those bloggers and eventually they became evangelists in their own right.
LESSON LEARNED: Your passionate users can market your product at least as well as you can, for free. Non-dilutive investment, baby.
Eventually, when we were just days away from raising capital from some of our earliest users, Yahoo! swooped in and bought us before we became three times as expensive overnight. It was a fairytale ending for sure, and it was way easier because Todd and I (and Scott Rafer) were the only folks on the cap table. Just the founders.
It can seem like the only way to get your company off the ground is to have someone give you a million bucks. But you can (and frankly should) do a lot before you ever ask for that first check.
If you live in Colorado and would like to learn more about non-dilutive funding options, please come to the next Thunderview CEO Dinner on Thursday, December 7th (at 6p at Mercury Cafe).
We're hosting a panel with Leah Spielberg, Megan Holcomb, Mike Hartman and Caleb Polley -- all experts and founders who have a wealth of knowledge about non-dilutive funding options.
You can sign up for tickets at https://thunderviewceodinners.com/apply
I hope to see you there and to inspire you to see how far you can get without asking investors for a check. I bet it's farther than you think.
#colorado #startups #venturecapital #community