Build your first web startup prototype with Wix, Weebly, WordPress, etc.
By Anna Vital (Founder, Funders & Founders)
Over the last three years I have seen over a thousand startups in their early stages. I witnessed many of them go from an idea to funding within several months. I have also seen some of them fundraising for years and not getting anywhere.
When it comes to funding, there is one thing that can increase your chance of getting funded astronomically – traction. Yet, founders often struggle to get traction and hope that investor money will help them get it. This problem can be solved if you start lean, test your product and and gather meaningful feedback from your customers.
Use that feedback to modify your product. After you get traction, you are certain to get interest from investors. How much traction? Compare yourself to your competitors at the moment they got funding and use that as a benchmark.
Preventing people from raising money successfully, the other myth is that you can raise money before you build anything. Even if you are not an engineer, you can build a prototype of your product. You can do it in WordPress, another content management system (CMS), you can learn to code the basics. If you do not go out of your way to build your own product, why should other people risk in joining you?
Finally, when you are raising money, have the investors feel good about what you are going to spend their money on – not marketing, not development, not business development, but scaling.
This guide illustrates one way of raising money for a startup, especially for first-time entrepreneurs. We have seen quite a few entrepreneurs go from nothing to a funded company. This infographic is a generalization of their experience.
Editor’s note: Got a question for our guest blogger? Leave a message in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Anna Vital is the founder of Funders and Founders, a San Francisco-based startup promoting startupization. She has been an entrepreneur since age 14 when she opened her first business, a test-prep school. After attending Brigham Young University in Utah, she attended law school in Nanjing, China. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, English, and Russian. In her ideal world, everyone from moms to engineers to executives will do startups. Follow her on Twitter at @fundersfounders.
