Bootstrapping. An entrepreneur is someone who likes to work without instructions, the one who loves freedom. But when you raise funds, you come under pressure of the funder. So always no for external funds.
We were self funded. In services, the more projects we did, the more we made. It was like we used to convince our employees to see a brighter future and the now we have proved ourselves.
My experiences: 1) Don't spend ages on building a beautiful product/website. 2) Get a Minimum Viable Product ready very quickly that should contain couple of your core product/service features. (Doesn't matter if it looks shabby) 3) Launch it to a small test audience and see if traction is there. Only then think of how much would you need to scale up in next level and if you have funds, go for self funding. If not, go for raising funds - first within city/state and then out of State. For detailed conversation about this, you can connect with me.
Agree! Most of the indian start ups are killed only at the first stage. They spend too much on building brand or making website beautiful. Funny thing is, most of them are self funded.
How can you even raise funds even before knowing the market challenges ?
We raised funds through a competition by the incubator, we participated, got selected after 5 rounds, got incubation and funding through http://www.espark-viridian.org/ Here let me talk a bit about my perspective on fund raising.
1. Fund raising doesn't mean surrender of your idea to investor,
So it is you who runs the business and not the investor.
2. Raising funds for scaling is the good idea, because self-funded companies have always boundaries for scaling, to do and not to do will be always praising point. Raising funds will open opportunities to increase your market share. Many profitable businesses are not scalable.
3. Product companies have higher chances of raising funds as service companies are difficult to scale without a solid process in place.
4. Fund raising is also a validation of your idea because then there is external person believes in your idea and he also believes that you can multiply his investment.
5. There is no defined formula but like any other game, there are rules of this game also
I would like to speak about one of the new trends most startups in early startups aren't aware. Govt. schemes and loans on subsidiary rates provided bu both central and state govt. to budding entrepreneurs and startups. To know more regarding these, you can check out this really helpful website i found while browsing, https://schemopedia.com/
Dimple Khubchandani
self funded . . . . Service based is mostly on CREDIT !