*WARNING: this post was written without spell check, without a proof read & is coming straight from my heart… and frazzled mind*
How do I get money to start my business? Is a question I hear an obnoxious amount of times, it is also a question I’ve asked myself over and over. So I decided that I’ll go through step by step how I started my business and how I plan to raise a little money for it now via the Angel investor model… this is a 2 part series but can be incredibly helpful if you are a start up or an entrepreneur in the beginning stages of business planning. Learn from my mistakes and take notes on the successes I’ve found in certain (usually out of the box) ways…
How I started my first business(es)
- Well my first online endeavors were powerselling on eBay which brought in a nice chunk of change (between the numbers of $3,000-$5,000 a month) in its hey day. Now I don’t really sell on eBay as much because it takes up WAY to much time compared to the profits. My eBay business was built completely on leverage, I spent $100 bucks on antique jewelry, turned around and sold it for $350 or so… then leveraged that to buy more and on and on it went.
- PowersellerPrincess.com was born out of my laziness and hatred of going to the post office 3 times a day. I decided since I had already figured out how to powersell on eBay and do it well why couldn’t I teach others to do the same… and it worked, except for one problem, I am really really tired of anything eBay related. I spent 19-23 doing eBay selling as my full time job (and going to school) and I don’t ever want to see the inside of a post office again for the rest of my life. So though PowersellerPrincess has TWO radical products to sell and good traffic consider I post less than once every two weeks it is really not doing much because I’ve lost my passion for it… thus I want to sell it or at least hire a writer who is passionate about eBay to write for me so I can build up its traffic (p.s. if you are interested in buying my baby call me 702-245-2423 because I really want just want to find someone who will take care of all the hard work I put into it). P.S. i probably sunk $1-3,o00k into that site because I didn’t know what I was doing at first, I spent a lot on SEO with little content (bad idea) and paid waaay to much for the design, etc.
- My next endeavor spun off into what I am working on full time now… my 3rd baby, tweeterpreneur.com I started because I really wanted to catch the wave of social media and it grew into a full fledged social media marketing & website design/development company in a few short months. Tweeterpreneur cost me very little to put up on the $$ it takes to pay my highly skilled VA’s to build it etc. I sell memberships on it for $97 a month and it brings in a chunk of change but not a windfall… that is when I started getting requests from people and businesses to manage their social media and/or build them websites. From there OracleLaunch was born and it is going to be my million dollar baby (come hell or high water).
My start up baby and her growing pains…
For Oracle Launch maybe I jumped the gun, I hired on 4 people total, two designers, one SEO person and a project manager who I couldn’t live without because face it, I’m terrible at coding, website development and anything techy… but I still LOVE it and truly adore helping businesses get viral online. So what happened is that I became the owner/sales person/book keeper/start up crazy person and the others who work for me build websites, manage basics of clients accounts and do SEO. Problem is, 4 people on full time payroll ISN’T cheap… so even though I have a few clients I am struggling because I have launched this company completely on my own dollar.
Savings have been drained, time has been spent and a lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this project. Now though we are getting more interest,traction and clients than ever I am realizing that I can’t go on any longer without cutting myself a paycheck and being in the red every month (Granted in years of entrepreneurship I have probably only spent $10,000 to build several businesses which compared to the ordinary brick and mortar store which can’t start even an ice cream parlor without $100k in capital up front).
So here is my predicament, what to do? Do I give up on my dreams because I’d have to go in a bit of debt to see them through to the fullest? Do I cut staff and try to do it all on my own (a scary prospect) or do I live on the streets using my lap top bag as a pillow in order to bootstrap myself even more?
I’ve haven’t figured it out just quite yet, but I am getting there. In p.2 I’ll explain what I have come up with to help figure out exactly the viability of my business start up and explain to you how to get money to start your own business too.
(please comment below & let me know what you think, or if you’ve experienced the same entrepreneurial angst in your own business)
