Where to look for money for a startup?

Eight sources of money for a startup   
Anton Nosik, UNOVA Media 

In Kazan, I told local computer scientists where to get money for a startup. It occurred to me that the bulletins that I voiced there (and those that I omitted for lack of time) they are worth fixing, because in written form it should look very simple and intelligible. It is hard to believe to what extent there are many people in today's Russia to whom the lack of start-up capital seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to launching their own projects.

• Source #1: Do not spend money at all until the prototype is ready. To invest labor – until you see that a promising project has turned out, in which it is also worth investing money
• Source #2: the project creator's own funds. If successful, this is the most competent investment. In the book "Runetology", Wikimart creator Maxim Faldin tells how he and his partner in 2009, after returning from the USA, sold their apartments near Moscow to invest in their startup. Today, the monthly volume of orders in this online store is $ 4 million.
• Source #3: if there is neither money nor an apartment that can be sold, then there is an option to borrow. One is more comfortable to borrow from friends and relatives, the other – from banks or other credit institutions. As an exotic, you can still get loans from the current employer against future salaries, if the position allows.
• Source #4: Angel investor. A person who will give money for a project simply because he believes in you, or in your idea. At the same time, he will become a co-owner of such a share in the project as you agree with him in advance. The peculiarity of a business angel is that its involvement is not furnished with the formalities required by investment funds. Drawing up business plans that meet the requirements of their accounting is an insurmountable obstacle for many startups. It is enough to recall on which knee the business contract was drawn up between Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, who gave the first 20,000 dollars on Facebook. Saverin, a boy from a rich Brazilian-Jewish family, who also earned 300,000 the previous summer on successful oil futures trading, was just the same angel investor. It all ended, as you know, with an ugly arbitration showdown. So, maybe there is a benefit in formally elaborated investment contracts at the earliest stage of the project.
• Source #5: investment funds specializing in high-risk start-up capital.
• Source No. 6: State and local authorities. Surprisingly, in addition to Butyrka and Matrosskaya Silence, there are other forms of state participation in the fate of business in Russia – there are entrepreneurship support programs in ministries and municipalities. I suspect that you need to spend more time and effort to get money from these sources than to create Yandex and Facebook combined, but the fact remains that there are many Internet projects that have received government funding in one form or another. Even the Moshkov Library, it's funny to say, has a grant from the Ministry of Communications. But if Moshkov had waited for him before creating his library, it would hardly have arisen at all. The grant was given because the library successfully managed without it at the start.
• Source #7: Grants from non-profit organizations. The same Moshkov Library received the first living money invested in the purchase of its own server in 1999 from the Electronic Publishing program of the Open Society Institute (this is the name of the very sinister George Soros foundation, with which our sheep from the Duma frighten the voter).
• Source #8: support of the broad masses, the notorious crowdfunding. Among the Russian examples, my Help is the most noticeable.Org (178 million rubles) and Alexey Navalny's RosPil (7 million rubles), but in the coming year we will probably see platforms similar to the American Kickstarter on our market, where today there are more than a million donors and more than $ 100 million of funds raised (excluding money donated to non-conjoined projects). The fundamental difference between Kickstarter is that a very significant part of the money that is collected there goes to completely commercial projects, and not only to social, cultural and public initiatives, as was customary in the charity market until very recently.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
28.11.2011