5 Weird Ways to Fund Your Startup

Starting a business is everyone’s dream. Yet in reality, it’s difficult to achieve, given the amount of time, money and effort it takes to setup a business that is bound to be a success.

Even when you find the time and effort to put into your business idea, the hardest factor is finding financial assistance to start it off.

Not every individual is able to find investments for their startups by doing what everybody else does. Most try to do this via one of the following ways,

1. 1. Finding an Investor
2. 2. Startup Loan (Bank)
3. 3. Crowdsourcing
4. 4. Borrowing From Friends & Family
5. 5. Mortgaging Property

But not everyone is able to find investors or even mortgage their property to start a business. But the following tricks can come in handy for those who are in desperate situations.

Selling Skills

Selling skills have been found to be very effective in making quick money. Before starting a company, how about putting those skills to work? You can offer any type of skill that you have in order to gain more support for your business.

There are many online freelancing websites that allow users to work without a contract. These websites take a portion of your earnings yet you are allowed to earn any amount you like. Good examples are Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer.

Working in these places may get you tons of money while at the same time helping you gain industry worthy experience. Some people even create unusual gigs for making money. It’s not that hard. Here are a few unusual gigs posted on Fiverr.

Borrowing Money

Even though borrowing money can be seen as a very standard way of funding, borrowing money from many people is not so.

The problem in borrowing money is the interest + debt you have to pay afterward. Money lenders usually expect high interests for the money they lend from the borrowers.

Friends and family are the first you turn to when you need money. Why? Because they are the closest individuals you know you can borrow money from for the lowest interest.

Not everybody is able to provide you $ 10000 dollars for your dream venture. However $ 1000 is an amount that someone can give away as an investment.

For an example, if you need $ 10000 for starting a business, borrow $ 1000 from 10 people for the lowest interest.

You can decide and customize according to your need and since you know these people personally, you can get them for minimum interest or no interest at all.

Creative Movements

Everybody likes to get excited about something that is going to be big. Make use of it and create some creative campaign to raise money for your venture.

Back in 2005, a young individual did something that changed his life forever. Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England started a concept website called a million dollar homepage to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. The image links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.

The buyers were provided tiny images to be displayed on them, URL linked to the image, and a slogan to be displayed when hovered over the link.

The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating million dollars of income for the creator. He owns a company now. Isn’t that a great idea?

YouTube Videos

Video has become the most popular content out of all multimedia content out there over the last quinquennium. YouTube made it possible by allowing free video streaming for millions of users around the world.

Many people started video blogging and becoming famous for it and making millions of money out of it by enabling the advertisements for YouTube.

One such celebrity is PewDiePie, Whose real name is Felix Kjellberg. He became the top-viewed creator of YouTube videos with more than 9 million page views. And he made $7.4 million last year from that, which mostly featured video game walkthroughs.

He just simply grabbed the idea that some people like to watch other people commenting while playing video games rather than actually playing them.

Stock Market

Stocks are an investment that gives you part ownership in a corporation and entitles you to part of that corporation's earnings and assets. Investing in stock market is a way of making some quick money.

In fact, it is one of the most profitable ways to make money, only if done correctly. However, just like forex trading, you could lose everything if an incorrect move is made.

Stock market consists of stocks offered by large to small corporations. You can either buy or sell them as you want. In order to get profit, you have to sell your stock when the particular company you bought stocks from is making profits.

The trick here is selling your stocks at the right time. Usually, the right time to sell stocks is when the stock prices are at a hike. If you’ve bought 1000 stocks of a particular company for 1$ each, at a price hike of 2$ per stock you get a profit of 1000$. Sounds fascinating right?

But you have to be careful of your investments as some companies go bankrupt without a warning. Still stock market is a great place to make some startup capital.

As you can see, these methods are very practical. Yet only a very few people would try them thinking they are a long shot, and many are unaware of them. You don’t need years of planning for starting ideas like these. Just do a brainstorming with a mind map and create a process for the business with flowcharts. You can use an online diagram tool like Creately to get these done fast. I assure you, any of these methods can generate capital to start your own venture in a successful way. Why wait? Start Today!

Sandeep Das is an active freelance writer. His other interests include organic SEO and growth hacking. He works closely with B2C and B2B businesses and has a background in marketing.