A Different Way to Fund Your Business

Today we are going to talk about an alternate way to fund your business. But before we do, don't forget, whatever platform you are coming from, don't forget to subscribe if you want to grow faster, if you want predictable growth. All right, so let's talk about this. A lot of people, you read TechCrunch, maybe you read some Twitter thread, and you often see what's going on. Companies are raising money. How are they raising money? A lot of it's coming from venture capital. Private equity is another option, institutional investments, and then there's friends and family as well, right? Right now, like when I think about this, that's, this is all that you see in the news. is because people are popularizing it, right? Because they've been— this is— these are tried and true methods to raise money. Um, the other thing I'll say is, yeah, there's the other way of just kind of bootstrapping, right? Sweat equity to, to, to get, um, to get to the next point. So A, why do you need to raise money in the first place? Well, in a lot of cases you might want to build something really big. And a lot of these food startups, let's, let's take for example, there was a food startup called Sprig. They raised about $45 million or so and they were delivering fresh food. They actually ended up shutting down, but they had to raise $45 million because it's a very capital intensive, type of operation. Now if you look at Blue Apron, they were delivering meal kits and they went public. They're doing a lot in revenue. I think they're doing all the way up to like $795 million in revenue. And what happened to them was that they raised a ton of money, I think over $100 million or so. And now their business is, um, they're, they're actually close to going out of business. They had to do a reverse stock split, which is actually fairly bad. That shows the business is trending in the wrong direction. I hope they make it out. You know what I'm saying here is again, capital intensive type of thing, right? So, If you are doing something where a lot of people are going to be using it and it's going to affect a lot of people, like even the, the, the Bird and the Lime scooters that you see around the world, or, you know, um, or Uber for example, right? You've got to have a lot of capital to grow faster that you put fuel on the fire. And obviously ideally you raise money not just on an idea, but when you actually have a formula that works. So if you can put $1 in, you're getting $4 back, you have a formula, you just put fire on it, right? In some cases you can't do that where, you know, it's just a concept and you know, from there you can raise money. Uh, but not always. So you usually want to have some kind of idea that's already working, you have some traction, then you raise some money for it, right? So I want to talk about the context of what I'm doing for, for my company right now, ClickFlow, and we are raising money and we're not going down the traditional route. The route that we're going down is through crowdfunding. So crowdfunding could be through something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but we're doing kind of our own crowdfunding round. And, um, you know, our, our deal basically right now, um, actually expires end of October 31st. How we're doing it is We're requiring accredited investors to come in, right? So accredited investors need to be people that have liquid assets of a certain amount, or they're doing like let's say $200,000 a year in in income, right? So crowdfunding is like this. So let's say we're trying to raise two million dollars or something like that, and we offer we offer our terms out there. We have a lawyer draw up the terms, and we put it out there for people saying if you put in X amount of dollars, we're offering this amount of shares in the company. You can have a minimum check size. So people for for our us right now, people are writing. $5,000 to $10,000 checks for our SEO A/B testing software, right? So some people might write $20,000 checks, but the minimum is $5,000 and you have to be accredited. So you can decide if you want them to be accredited or not. Just for us, our lawyer told us that, and I'm not a lawyer by the way, don't take this as, you know, this is entertainment value. You know, our lawyer basically told us that, hey look, you should do accredited because that's gonna protect you and prevent you from kind of getting thrown into jail. You don't want that to happen, right? So you wanna make sure that people are getting verified. And we use a service called VerifyInvestor to check on each and every investor just to make sure they're verified, right? That way kind of you're covered from any kind of issues that might, might stem. And so, you know, what we're doing is, you know, when you crowdfund, you want to set it for a certain amount of time. There's gotta be a sense of urgency and you can promote it to your email list. You can promote it to the audiences that you have, right? And then, you know, we even have a little invest now button on the bottom of our ClickFlow website. You know, we made a video describing what the software does and then, um, you know, our deal was promoted on a network where people can invest on and there's deal flow in the backend. And, um, I actually got grilled by someone asking me questions just to see how legit the company was. You know, I had to show kind of, um, create some slides, show, you know, with the traction of the company, where it's going, how big the market is. And I'm answering a lot of questions like Q&A on the forums. So there's a lot that goes into it. But at the end of the day, I don't need to go on the roadshow for, you know, venture capital where I might pitch, you know, could be hundreds of investors, right? And believe it or not, Peloton, as of this recording, they actually went public today. And that guy, um, the CEO, I forgot what, I forget what his name is, but he burned through 400 investor meetings before he finally secured a round of funding. And he actually crowdfunded first. On Kickstarter to get it, get it going, right? So when you don't have investors that believe in you, maybe it's not the right type of people because VCs want to put a lot of money into things. They have a different model. Private equity, they want to see a lot more traction, maybe more mature businesses. If you want to get started, crowdfunding is the way to go. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, those are certainly some things to look at. For us, we decided to use kind of an investment platform. So, you know, for us it's invest.clickflow.com. Um, for, you know, those people that are interested in kind of going in and checking it out and putting money in there. So, you know, for us right now we've raised about $200,000. You know, our target is about $250,000, so we're not looking to raise a lot of money, but it's good because it gets us going and we can move a lot faster, right? Versus having to wait longer. So money, you know, when you're ready, when you have something going, like, you know, being able to focus on the company, um, last couple of months, it's really moved us a lot faster and like we're, this thing is really starting to run and you know, we're, we're super excited for it. So crowdfunding, check it out. I was kind of skeptical in the beginning, but, um, yeah, it's working and, uh, that's, you know, we set our round to close October 31st. So again, you can check it out, feel free if you want, invest.clickflow.com. Um, to see how our crowdfunding page looks, um, to see, you know, how we answer questions and then all the work that we put into it. Hopefully that gives you enough confidence to go, um, to the next stage of your business if you decide to raise money. So let me know if there's any other types of funding that you think is good for businesses or if you have questions on it, drop them in the comments below. Um, if you're watching on YouTube and if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there. It's going to be amazing. And whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.