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Hi Everyone,
I figure there are a lot of inexperienced and new entrepreneurs on here. While I don't know everything and I firmly believe that no matter how experienced the entrepreneur, there is always more room to learn (myself included), and there are a lot of misconceptions I constantly see that I want to give my two cents on and hopefully this advice will help many of you guys.
Disclaimer: these are base on my personal experience and there are exceptions to every rule.
These are in no particular order but here are some of the common subjects that come up often:
1] Raising Capital
For the most part, this forum is the wrong place to look for funding. The likelihood of you finding a real VC or Angel on this forum is slim. The other issue is the people seeking funding (as far as I've seen) have no clue how to go about it properly but rather seemingly is asking for a handout base on random ideas they have. This is not how raising capital works. While the idea is important, any experienced entrepreneur will tell you its the execution that matters. By execution, I'm referring to working prototypes, sites, something... besides your words and ideas of how you plan to achieve this. Unless you're an experienced entrepreneur with a track record, no one is going to just blindly invest in an idea with some random stranger they've never met (very slim). It's almost insulting and a serious waste of time to just explain an idea with nothing to show for it and most real Angels or VCs would turn you away.
Having said that, I don't know about international laws so I'm going to speak from the US perspective. You should only accept funding from an accredited investor and vice versa, only an accredited investor should be investing. There are legal ways to do this correctly. Those who don't remotely understand anything about raising capital, what an accredited investor is comprised of, or anything else I'm referring to, should do some massive research on this before just randomly posting on a forum and expect strangers to take a risk on you, especially when some of you are halfway around the globe on the other end with no guarantees or safeguards for the investors (even if any were willing to take the chance).
This is very different than raising seed capital from family and friends or loaning money to start your business. If you haven't tried doing this, this should be your first step. If you expect strangers on a forum to do this for you by providing capital, you're most likely going to be disappointed in most cases.
2] Research
There is nothing wrong with asking people for advice and certainly nothing wrong with networking on the forum to learn more. However time and time again I find that a lot of inexperienced people provide inaccurate advice base off nothing more than what they read somewhere else rather than through experience. Worse, a lot of the information some people ask on the forum can be answered through a simple Google search but rather than doing their own research, they post threads after threads on the forum expecting everyone else to do the research for them or answer their questions. We're here to help but we're not here to build your business for you.
As a matter of fact, some of the questions being asked proves that some of the people who want to execute their ideas are not ready to build a business (harsh and difficult for some to accept). This is not to put anyone down and I believe everyone should network and share knowledge and help each other out. That's the whole point of a community such as this one but its clearly obvious that some of you guys have ideas but no idea how things work and just want to dive right in. This works for certain things but for business, if you don't know something, it's probably a good idea to research all the details on how to get started before trying to execute an idea. What's the rush? For example, if you are trying to build a web base business and you don't have any clues on how to register a business or what web hosting is, it would be good to research these things rather than simply focusing on the business idea and trying to launch next week or finding people to build your business for you. This is not a stab at anyone, just a random example.
Of course I'm not saying that many people aren't researching as I'm sure you are, however, do more research. It is your business, no one will care more about it than you, act like it. Successful entrepreneurs spend countless hours working day and night getting their business up and running. That's how it always is.
3] Protection
Okay, lets be honest. The likelihood of someone stealing your ideas are slim, although not impossible. Anyone who knows anything knows NDAs don't actually protect squat and its almost never worth pursuing if someone who signed an NDA decides to implement your ideas. Chances are most of you don't have the money to go to litigation to begin with and don't expect a lot of pro bono or free work or post lawsuit payment attorneys to take your case.
The rule of thumb is share only what you're comfortable with. I'm not saying not to get an NDA. It's always a good idea to get an NDA and not really divulge more than what you're comfortable with without the NDA (or even with an NDA). However even with an NDA, don't expect miracles. At the end of the day, the likelihood of someone stealing your idea even if they know the ins and outs of your business idea is slim, especially on this forum. I'm not saying disclose everything but people who are overprotective of their idea is harming themselves more than helping as you're not really getting all the help you can (and how could you as no one even knows anything about what you're trying to do).
Tread cautiously.
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I had a lot more I wanted to include but temporarily forgot about the subjects so I'll continue you this when I remember what I was going to say. Feel free to provide your feedbacks below.
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