Here’s to self-fund almost any startup and avoid the grief of trying to raise money from strangers. This is how elite Inc 500 entrepreneurs self-fund their startups.
Before you can attempt anything truly great, you will need courage.
Before you can have the courage, you will need the knowledge.
The Guerrilla Startup Guide was written for people who need to launch immediately and create positive cashflow quickly with a minimal up-front cash investment.
This is the startup guide that I wish had existed back in the mid-1980s when my entrepreneurial career began. Since it didn’t, I began collecting stories about how innovative entrepreneurs launched their companies when outside capital wasn’t available. Someone once said that entrepreneurs are the artists of the business world because they create something out of nothing. The really good entrepreneurs certainly can and do.
From both being an entrepreneur and helping other entrepreneurs over two decades, I have come to divide them into two groups based on how they handle the startup phase. The first group rigidly weds itself to a particular plan which then requires a certain sum of capital to carry out. This group then begins by writing a business plan and shopping it around to investors. The problem with this approach is that investors who are willing to put money into nothing more than a stranger’s idea are as rare as hen’s teeth. This is why most startups are never able to raise the necessary outside capital and, therefore, either die on the vine or finally morph into something else more do-able after 6 to 12 months of a futile capital chase. The second and much smaller group consists of entrepreneurs who announce their intentions to go after a given market opportunity and are, seemingly magically, in business a month later with bona fide customers and sales revenues. Most of us have noticed members of this second group in action and felt some degree of awe.
What is the difference between these two types of entrepreneurs? What is the magic used by the second group? These are the questions that inspired the research which culminated in The Guerrilla Startup Guide.
The objective of this guide is to help you to discover how to create a cashflow positive situation quickly and long before investors are approached. Your first priority is to survive the Financing Valley of Death. That pet project requiring substantial investor capital may, therefore, have to wait a bit. First things first, as they say. You need some credibility before people with money will take you seriously. Shoot for cashflow immediately with a transitional business model if you have to. Do not make the mistake of wasting 6 to 12 months shopping a plan around to strangers. Very few revenue-less startups succeed at raising capital from outsiders unless they happen to have a stellar team of respected industry names on their rosters.
Once you have successfully passed through the Financing Valley of Death you will stand a far better chance of attracting investors or, better yet, you may discover that you no longer need them and their money.
From now on I want you to think of entrepreneurs as being like certain chefs. Some chefs are very rigid in their style requiring that a specific list of ingredients be made available to them before they can start cooking. This is fine so as long as you are not too hungry and can wait for the required ingredients to appear. However, if you are hungry now and lack the cash to buy more groceries, you will need to be flexible and work with what you have. The other chefs, the more entrepreneurial ones, will not wait for someone else to deliver everything to them, but will instead immediately begin to search the pantry, refrigerator, and vegetable garden for what’s available. They then use the items at hand to start creating a nourishing meal.
This is what true entrepreneurship is all about. It’s starting with what’s at hand now.
The Big-3 Cash Burners
The Guerrilla Startup Guide is about successfully cashflow engineering your way through the startup phase and becoming cashflow positive. Cashflow engineering involves substituting “cash floats” for actual cash and finding ways to minimize or eliminate the Big-3 Cash Burners: accounts receivable, inventory, and fixed assets. You don’t need to be strong in math or accounting to master the skill. All you need to be able to do is understand your cashflow position.
In entrepreneurship it’s all about quickly creating cashflow and being able to pay your bills. It’s not about wasting a half-year or more of your life shopping a plan around to strangers as the bills stack up at home and your spouse fumes. Take my word for it, you may love a certain widget which you want to introduce to the world, but you will love positive cashflow even more. If your widget requires a considerable amount of money to launch, focus on cashflow first and proving your entrepreneurial mettle before chasing investors. You will save yourself a lot of time and grief this way. As we will see in the guide there are all sorts of ways to get your project out of the starting blocks and up and running.
Finally, think of this guide as a collection of tactics for quick advance rather than a strategy. All of them are do-able although not all may be applicable to your particular situation. Each business is unique to a degree.
Today in honor of the 4th of July, and today only, the Guide has been dramatically discounted.
Don’t miss out on this most likely once in a lifetime offer!
Go to this page and scroll down for the special price.
Peter Ireland
