Financing for a startup is not very easy to acquire. But it is not impossible either. Some financing methods are fairly easy, while others are extremely difficult to obtain. First, I will define some methods of obtaining financing and rank them as Hard, Medium and Easy:
In a previous post, I called co-workers on the job and the job itself mediocre. While that statement is true, I am NOT saying that employement is a bad thing. Having a job is useful since you gain experience and may learn a thing or two. Sure, the learning may be slow, but you still learn a few useful things. After all, I did and still am!
I once was told by a seasoned entrepreneur to “continue working at your job and you will see many unresolved problems. These problems spaw ideas, potentially ideas that you can start a business from.” On the job, while learning about many aspects surrounding a device, I noticed that my company still uses paper records to log information about indivdual devices. Often times they need to search through large file cabinets to find a particular device’s history. Sometimes, they are unable to find the records.
An open source project called anyInventory provided inspiration for the development of anyInput. See the anyInventory homepage here. anyInventory seems to be no longer maintained as of March 2005.
anyInventory is very similar to the first product that I made. It had alerts, multiple users, was customizable and was very simple to use. Here is a testimonial for anyInventory:
Merry Christmas! …….I mean happy holidays (politically correct) Anyway, the idea for anyInput was growing in my mind for about 4 years before I decided to begin developing anyInput about 10 months ago. The sources of the idea are work, anyInventory and my first product attempt.
One of my main reasons for starting my own thing is so that I someday I may be able to escape the life of corporate mediocrity. By ‘corporate mediocrity’ I am calling many people at my job mediocre.
One seasoned entrepreneur I talked to a several years ago made the statement, “The world is full of mediocre people. So I hire people late and fire fast.” Later on, while at work, his statement started to make sense.
In case you do not know, I am an engineer at a large fortune 500 company. The job is decent, the salary is adequate and I am solid with many co-workers. So why in the world would I even consider starting my own thing? One textbook from an entrepreneurship class that I took in my Masters program says people become entrepreneurs for different reasons. Here are some: