"How to build your startup without investors?"

Now-a-days, one thing which very few people will agree is that a start-up can be done without investor. But let me tell you from my personal experience that it is doable for at least initial 3 to 5 years.

Creating a start-up, keeping the investors away for few years and building sustainable revenue, adding significant value to the client and generating employment for the people and creating wealth is all doable. And good news is that for doing all this, your startup need not to be a idea stage funded startup.

I would like to discuss founders profile here before sharing my own stories-

There are three categories of founders:

Which category founder you are?

#1 I am excited about creating a start-up but I don’t have any idea what business to do and how to start the business.

#2 I am excited about creating a start-up, I have an idea also about which I am passionate but I need help to fine tune my idea before projecting it as a startup and before launching it in real world and need help for this.

#3 I am excited about creating a start-up, I have a lot of ideas and need to decide which one to go ahead with and which will be most suitable and profitable business idea before going ahead with one best idea. I would fall in this category of founders.

Core vs Passion

We human beings are normally multi-passionate people. So I want to break the myth here that one should always do a start-up in the area where he or she has worked in employment or worked in the past (i.e. core area). It is not always necessary. So your area of expertise can be a starting point of your start-up but major area of your start-up may comprise secondary areas which is your passion. As per product or service category, you are the main decision maker for your start-up.

For example- I worked in accounting and auditing mostly in my career in employment and my passion has always been in business and startup advisory. So I founded company and initial clients were from accounting and auditing industry (being core) but gradually I was able to pursue my passion also within the same company. It's all about how founders and startup evolve over the period of time.

I would like to narrate my brief story how I built my startup without investor-

3 years ago, I left job at PwC to pursue entrepreneurial dreams in consulting industry. In Oct, 2017 when I got chance to interact one on one with Mr. Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Info Edge. He asked me couple of questions about the start-up which I founded in August 2017. This interaction shifted my mindset completely from an investor focused new founder to completely client focused new founder.

His advice:

Don’t focus on investors at initial days of your start-up, just focus fully on your customers. Purpose of my visits to these meetings was to explore funding and did not know how to react when advised to stop investors hunting.

Today I am living his million dollar advise. I learned that never let lack of resources interfere with your entrepreneurial dreams.

This story is about concurring initial challenges of bootstrapping a start-up.

Don’t quit your journey, rather gather courage and right attitude to overcome obstacles.

Note: My self-expression is to inspire and empower people. You are learning from experiences, not from theories. I enjoy working with early stage startups and founders.

It would be great to know your similar stories in comments.

Thank you

Amit