Never Do THIS When Raising Capital | 4 Minutes

If you want investors to put money into your business, you have to go to them with more than just a plan. Go to them with some traction. Go to them with some momentum. Go to them with some customers. If you can do that, you dramatically increase your chances of getting the money you need to grow this business. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help. So today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers. His name is Shawan. From the Netherlands, thank you for watching. He said, "I built a new social media platform. How can I reach big investors with millions of dollars to look at my plan and maybe invest in it?" So thanks for the question, Shirwan. You have to go with more than just a plan for a social media platform. When I was in the venture capital business, my role was bringing in new deals and looking at thousands of business plans. And the ones that got turned away were always the ones who just had an idea. They had no traction, they had no track record, they had barely a team, they had no customers, no revenue. That's not an easy business to raise money for. You have to have something to stand out from the crowd. The problem is, everybody with an idea just goes out and pitches investors. To find a list of venture capital investors is not hard to do. To get them to actually put money in your business is hard. And so you want to go to them showing how you're different than the other 99% of the companies that are pitching to them. You're more than just an idea. So you build a team, you build an advisory board, you actually start building something, building your product, building your service out. You start getting some traction with the media, you start getting some partners. All of that is possible without getting funding. You may not make huge headways, but that's okay. You don't need to go out and land huge multimillion-dollar deals. Just show me that you can get one customer. Get one paying customer for what you do, and already you set yourself apart from everybody else, most of the people who are pitching these venture capitalists. Otherwise, you're gonna spend your time making this business plan, pitching investors, and you're gonna get shot down every time you go out. Raising money is almost a full-time business in itself, and it's gonna distract you from being able to build the business on your own. The best way to do it is to bootstrap it from the start. Put your hard-earned time into it, work the late hours, do whatever you can to convince people to help you out. You gotta bootstrap this thing up. Start building momentum and traction into this business. Try to get at least a couple customers to pay you and show that what you have works, and then go to investors to get money to expand this business. Investors don't expect you to have everything all planned out, but you have to have something more than just a plan on paper. Otherwise, they're going to say no. I hope that helps. Maybe some tough love for you there, but I want to make sure that you get the best chance that you have at getting the money that you're looking for. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Makes me want to do more for you, more videos. And if you have a question about this video or about raising capital or about anything else with your business, I'd love to try to answer it for you if you want to leave it in the comment section below. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.