How To Start A Business With No Money Or Funding By Bootstrapping

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An overwhelming number of people who write to me asking about how they can start a business, ask specifically about how they can start a business with no money and not funding. Of course, it is much simpler to start a business with money, but many people start successful businesses without any money. In this article I will explain how you can start a business with no money, and no funding by successfully bootstrapping your business.

Most Entrepreneurs Do Not Have Money

Keep in mind that almost every entrepreneur has to face the problem that they don’t have enough money (or any money) to help them accomplish the things that they need to accomplish with their business. So you are not alone. And there are many lessons that you can learn from entrepreneurs who have started and built their businesses with little or no money.

How To Raise Money

There are many potential sources for raising money. You can try to get donations, grants, investments, loans, various creative fundraising techniques, or even quickly getting your business to earn revenue so that the business gets money through its revenue. You can also try working a full time or part time job to get the funds to start your business.

Here is a general video about the chances raising money during the planning or idea stage of your business.

Here is a brief tutorial on 7 fundraising ideas to raise money.

Let’s cover some of these fundraising ideas in a little more depth. First, there is the idea of raising money through getting donations via crowdfunding.

And here is a tutorial about how to get a small business grant, and how difficult it is to get business grants.

Here is a tutorial on how to write a fundraising plan so that you can get your fundraising ideas organized. There are additional things you can do to raise money, but keep in mind that while you have many fundraising options, none of them are particularly easy, and will require a serious time commitment and effort on your part. So choose them wisely and carefully. And if you can, try to earn money through the revenue of your business. Most of the time, that is the most sustainable way to fund your business for the long term.

And here is a tutorial for how to determine how much money you need to start a business.

Start A Business By Bootstrapping

Most entrepreneurs start a business by simply bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is a methodology and a mindset to find ways for doing everything cheaply by using your resourcefulness and creativity because you know that you can’t afford to pay for most things outright. Here is a video about how to start your business with no money by bootstrapping.

As an example, when I started my mobile app business, I started it with no money so I could not hire employees. That meant that I had to learn many of the potential skill sets that I needed. Of course, I could not do many of the tasks that I needed to a very high degree of quality, but I could easily do many of the tasks to 70% of the quality of a professional, and most of the time that was enough.  Even if at first the quality of the task was visibly lacking, I was able to improve what I originally made because over time I would also grow my skill at that particular task. This is a much slower way of doing things than giving a task to a professional, and getting a polished result back quickly. But long-term it is much cheaper and less time consuming because I don’t have to ask anyone for help. Having acquired many particular skills, I can just complete multiple tasks and not have any delays in waiting for anyone.

Further Business Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app.  Additionally, here is the iOS marketing app. And here is the Android marketing app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.

Author: Alex Genadinik

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