ESYB2 076 - Earning Money From Your Own Revenue
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[00:00:00] Now let's talk about raising money from your actual business revenue because often fundraising is not better than generating money from your actual business. Fundraising is often a distraction to the business, so why not make getting money a part of the business? Because long term you'll have to make money from your clients anyway, you can't escape that, so you might as well get started on it early.

The only caveat is For technical products like mobile apps, or if you're thinking of building like the new Uber, sometimes if you charge early, it restricts growth. But for tech products, they're high growth products. So keeping it free is actually part of the growth strategy, because as soon as you monetize something, even if you don't charge for the front, but if you Put ads on it.

Well, it makes the experience immediately worse. So if high growth is your goal, then you want to not monetize early. That's the caveat. But if just [00:01:00] generating revenue is your goal, then you want to monetize relatively early. And for small businesses or services, you should charge early on just to keep the lights on, just to fund yourself.

And you want to practice that early, because you want to practice selling, you want to practice Price strategies. You want to practice negotiation. You want to get feedback from customers about your pricing. So actually, this is actually going to help you build your business and generate money to fund the business without wasting time going through the steps of fundraising.

Because fundraising can be extremely frustrating because a lot of it is Getting rejected, working up all this excitement, maybe meeting an investor, then getting rejected by them, then being sad the rest of the day, at least that's how it was for me, and it was very wasteful. So, if you haven't started, how do you get money from clients?

That might be a question. So you can always get clients revenue, even if you haven't started. Let me explain how to do that. And this brings us to our next fundraising [00:02:00] strategy, which is pre start revenue from clients. And that does require Extra hustle because you what you'll have to do is approach potential customers even before starting and it would be kind of like your process of getting product feedback, but you'd say, would you buy it also in that conversation if they say, yeah, you can ask for money and say, you'll use that money to build a product and what you'll give them is maybe a lifetime discount or a free plan, depending on how you structure your service or product, but you'll give them some super perk if they give you the money to actually build it.

And an example for that, that I'm aware of is like an app that had a product for bars and they went to local bars and as the bars to donate, they literally went through every bar in their town, got to talk to the owner. Most people rejected them, of course, but some people donated and they got enough money to hire a developer and build the app and then the app was built and went live.

[00:03:00] Now, this was very time consuming. Yeah, of course it's very time consuming, but all the other fundraising ideas are very time consuming too. And a lot of it just depends on your hustle. So you see, but this is an example of you can even generate revenue from customers if you don't have a product yet. So it's not impossible.

You just have to have the extra hustle and the extra daring.

