Wise Startup Blog

This is the best time to start a company. Competition is dropping like flies, there’s plenty of room for experimentation, and the economy is in the toilet.

Startup companies fill the void that mega-corporations leave behind when marketing and research and development budgets get pulled back.

So we all have great ideas for startup companies, but how do we get the money? It’s hard to find multimillionaires just lying around, so you need to learn how to finance the company yourself, aka boostrap financing.

As a startup entrepreneur, we’ve done more than our share of boostrapping, and I wanted to share with you some of the more creative and ingenius ways to bootstrap your new company.

How To Bootstrap Your Startup

Credit Cards

So okay, we may have a big credit line, but how can this help us pay our employees or pay rent? Most employees don’t accept credit cards.

Well, the great thing about the Internet, is you can sell virtually anything. I’ve been selling laptops for years, so if I have a $20,000 limit card, I buy $20k in laptops, and flip them on eBay. I can probably net some money in the process, but I get pretty close to the original $20k return I had.

Now here’s the key thing, don’t pay off the credit card in full. Keep the $20k in your bank account, and pay the minimums on the cards. Now you have a nice working checking account to start operating your business. If you have a 0% card it’s even better because it’s a 0% loan.

Pre-Orders

Have no money? Have a great idea? Why don’t you start selling your idea? Your goal is to sell something that you haven’t even created yet. The best story is of Bill Gates. He sold his Microsoft operating system to IBM when it didn’t even exist.

He sold it, then worked non-stop to deliver them the software, and the best part — he got an advance otherwise known as working capital.

So if you have a really great idea and absolutely no money, hone your sales skills and start taking some pre-orders.

Start Small

We all may have aspirations to be the next Google, but the reality is we’re not going to have the next Google on our hands.

So you might as well start small. Create your first 10 widgets, and sell them. You’ll be amazed at how much you learn just by selling your first ad, product, service, etc. and once you make that first sale, selling the next 1,000 will be a cinch.

The key to growing a company is to take it one day at a time. We all have a little extra money we can set aside for a business, so start saving, and start with the small pieces, because everybody started small.