Someone asked a question on LinkedIn about the best way to finance a new venture. What do you think of my response?
“By far the best way to finance a new venture is by customers paying in advance for your products that may or may not truly exist yet. Each dollar you bring in with this customer-centric finance approach provides more than a dollar of value by also validating your market (In the raise-capital-then-build-product-then-sell-product model there is a much higher risk that you will build something that no one wants to buy.) and creating a group of reference customers to help you sell even more product once you are ready. Recent crowdfunding sites like kickstarter (which is essentially a pre-sales tool) provide this benefit if you are targeting many, smaller customers. If your product is more enterprise in nature, though, you will need to do the selling yourself.”