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Nigerian StartUps, find your way to Crowfunding


For every startup, funding is a vital ingredient to growth. Although you may not need to have big cash to start well, your big idea is required.

As your startup grows, you will definitely require cash at some point to fund some processes, procedures or anything catalyst that could speed up or fine tune growth. It could be logistics, acquisition of tools of trade, hiring a techie or some specialist(s), value addition to your products/service and many other reasons as may apply.

Well, thanks to technology and creativity that surround us especially those instrumental strategic pushing of funding to end users. The major practices we’re used to are the business funding all the way to production and having to recoup their investment only when they are lucky to sell. The risk involved is higher in that model actually.

For some startups, strategies have evolved where you find most of the investment come as labour and dedicated time developing the products and services. Cash flow begins as soon as the product/service rolls out to consumption. . In the long run, when services are consumed, the business gets an exponential rise in cash capital. And if the service is well designed to demand less attention in terms of support, the cash flow might be humongous. This also favours some that have adopted the strategy.

Lastly, some adopt the concept that production is usually funded by investments from many that buy their idea. Time is well spent in developing concept, setting the pace for operations and even running the business at low scale. Money is gathered, as investment, from a number of people/entities to jump start the business. This model is Crowdfunding, literally raising funds from a crowd. Business Insider gave a list of 100 top crowdfunded companies published in 2013.

To crowdfund, some online platforms exist to crowdfund for your startup. See GoFundMe through which over $3bn have been raised so far for social causes and help, KickStarter to fund projects and Indiegogo for entrepreneurial and non-for-profit causes. I recommend you try for jump starting your business. Just be sure you have the right presentation. If you don't, keep reviewing until you get the attractive one. Some offer to have their custom means of doing it. Example is WinthrillsNetwork.

I see crowdfunding to have less risk on the business managers as investors. All terms and conditions are usually well spelled out. On the part of investors too, one invests according to risk taking capacity and self-analysis. This is concept behind crowdfunding, or at least most of it.

The advantages here for the business and investors are less risk. Investors can mitigate their risk by investing lesser amounts. For the business they have enough funds to run their business and give investors a share of the profit as their agreements provide. Crowdfunding could as well be not for profit to the crowd.

My objective here is to encourage startups to see it as a means to jump start their businesses. You could give it a try.

Read Techpoint.ng's article on the subject here.

Comments

  1. Frank Zephyr10 September 2017 at 08:49

    Definitely!
    Instead of reaching out individually to friends and others who know your antecedents and believe in your dream, crowdfunding is a perfect way to reach as many people as possible.

    ReplyDelete

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