TweetShareShare How I used loans, grants, angel investors and accelerators to finance my first $500k for my business. If you’re a startup founder, you know the toils of capitalizing company growth. In the tech space, we’re often led to believe that the golden path to that growth is that of venture capital.
I’m CEO and Founder of EnrichHER, which is a platform that helps women-led businesses grow their companies through our lending platform and through our network. Some of the responses to this next question may seem obvious for some people, but in a world where some people are pushed toward different funding vehicles such as venture capital, why should certain business owners think about using different ways of financing their companies, thinking more broadly about what types of capital they have access to and how it will impact their company. Right now it’s really sexy in the media to be a venture-backed company.
That’s what I did to start my business, I applied to different educational programs geared towards startups that were social impact. I was accepted to two of them that gave me grant funding that I didn’t have to repay and it really gave me the foundation to kick off my company. Roshawnna, I just need to stop you for a second and tell you that’s amazing. Ok continue. [Laugher]. So I did that when I was 15. I was really hard core, I’d studied debt, I’d studied money. My mother made me learn the Rule of 72. For those of you who don’t know, when you look at the interest rate for a loan that you’re taking out and have to repay, you divide the APR by 72 to figure out how long it would take you to double that money.
When I was walking out of the room there was a writer from Fast Company in the idea who approached me and said my idea was amazing, and asked me for an interview for an article that was going to be published the following month. I said yes, and within a month of me coming up with this idea, before I developed anything, I was in a Fast Company article based on this pitch competition that I thought was crazy.
Another way that’s not as obvious is getting your customers involved in the growth of your company. There are different ways to do that. One of them, which we do through EnrichHER, is we have in-person activations in different cities, and we have the standard price, and then we have a higher price if someone wants to contribute extra money to our cause, our business and what we’re about. And every time, there are people who attend who do just that.
Essentially, it’s like all the other types of crowdfunding. You’d create an offering, a statement that would include your company information – your team, your product, your projections, your financials – and as you meet those objectives and grow your company, that owner that participates in the crowdfunding would be able to reap those rewards.