A small investment, like $10K, is enough for a solo founder to fund their own salary for six months while they build their product.
That’s the premise behind Micro Invest from maker Mohd Danish, which launched on Product Hunt after a positive response to a tweet about connecting founders to investors, one-to-one.
To the outside world, tech fundraising is often portrayed as meetings with eccentric personalities in cutthroat VC firms, like Silicon Valley’s Russ and Laurie. That won’t stop any time soon since venture capital continues to set records. Crunchbase shows "funding was up by more than $100 billion for the first half of 2021 compared to the previous half-year peak [of] global funding in the second half of 2020."
Founders have more options these days though, like crowdfunding. Platforms like Republic offer makers access to a large pool of individual investors, including people they don’t have existing relationships with.
However, Danish believes that single relationships might help makers skip headaches related to fundraising and get straight to conversations with passionate backers who are also focused on building the product.
A focus on execution is one reason makers cite choosing to bootstrap their company rather than fundraise at all. Bootstrappers often see their decision as one between focusing on users of their product and pleasing investors.
Resources for bootstrappers are growing, too. A year ago, Andrew Gazdecki launched MicroAcquire, a marketplace that helps bootstrapped startups start conversations that lead to an acquisition. MicroAcquire has now surpassed $800K in annual recurring revenue from premium buyer subscriptions. Last week, Gazdecki deepened his dedication to this space by launching Bootstrappers, a publication dedicated to covering bootstrapped makers and their products.
Whether makers choose to fund their own projects or fundraise is a decision they have to make based on personal and product needs. If you’re a maker that’s considering fundraising, in addition to Micro Invest you can check out a couple of resources from others in the Product Hunt community: Max Fleitmann has put together 6 Lessons From Raising Millions from Investors and Eric Crane shared his 6 lessons after raising a $35M Series A for Flatfile in March.
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