Do you need to raise investment

Do you have to raise investment for a startup? No, you don't. There are quite a few cases where startup entrepreneurs and founders built their project entirely with their own money. There is even a term for it, bootstrapping, which literally means pulling yourself up by your boots, by the straps. In our industry, it means developing a project entirely with your own funds. Why do startup founders try to get by without investment, or at least put off that moment for as long as possible? Because bringing an investor into a project is like getting married. It is a very serious and important step.

And making a mistake here is truly frightening. That is because an investor's entry into the company brings certain restrictions and obligations for the founder. First, you give away a share of your company, so you will then have to hand over part of the profits from the company's operations to the investor for the rest of your life, for as long as they remain a shareholder in your company. Second, there is one more person in the company, and especially if they hold a substantial block of shares, that is a shareholder you have to reckon with, whom you will have to report to monthly, quarterly and annually, and with whom you will have to agree on key points in the startup's development.

If you are used to being independent, if you are used to making decisions yourself, this will of course cause you a certain amount of discomfort. And not just discomfort: at some point it can even lead to serious conflicts. It often happens that the investor sees the startup's development strategy going in one direction and the founder in another. These disputes can turn into fundamental conflicts, and then you will have to put in a lot of effort to “divorce” such an investor and remove them from the company. All of this, of course, is unnecessary trouble. So if you have the opportunity to develop the project with your own funds or with money from friends and relatives, try to keep developing it on your own, without raising investment, for as long as possible.