Is funding really needed for startup?
I want to create an online service (social network type basically) and I am trying to understand how to do it. Is it possible to team up with people who would be interested to do it in their free time? or the only way it can work is that I have to create a company and get funding?
âWhy wonât people just build my social network (lol) for free?â More seriously, whatâs your business model? How will you be making money? There are definitely companies that can be profitable without taking in funding, but theyâre always small personal projects. For something to scale beyond that level requires money...lots of it.
I donât want anybody to do anything for me, I think this idea has potential. Even though itâs yet another social network. Monetization through ads. But the problem is that without users it wonât make sense to anybody to advertise there unless thereâs somewhat big audience. So it canât be making money right away
So how do you expect to pay for the infrastructure to host the app? How about legal? Sales? Accounting? Marketing? All of these things need to exist before you can even think about making money. Forget building the app itself.
Just because it's never worked before doesnt necessarily mean it can't. That said raising money is insanely easy so why not just properly fund it if you wanna do it?
Even I was in the phase when I had an account in aws and saw a few react tutorials on YouTube. This too shall pass my friend.
đ So what phase are you in right now? BTW I also saw tutorials on firebase, looks like there is no need for backend as well haha đ
This phase is a level 10 equivalent in mmorpg, someone who finished tutorial quests
Learn to build it yourself. Building an mvp webapp for testing a concept for a social network should be easy enough that you can figure it out. Otherwise you need a technical cofounder who believes in the vision enough to work on just equity stake or money to pay people. Better yet, don't even bother building a genuinely functional product yet, just build a splash page and marketing campaign and check for conversion on FB or G ads to email signups to see if anyone cares about your idea. Most startups die because of poor product market fit and you can start derisking that with little money or technical talent.
Nothing is stopping you from trying. Funding just gives you resources for runway and to scale.