

Ask HN: How do scrappy start-up founders get money fast? - citizenkeys

For those of you like me that boot-strap your start-up, how do you come up with cash in a hurry?  Is it craigslist? The local pawn shop?  What?
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patio11
Salary/savings. Juice loans and pawn shops are _terrible_ ideas. Don't do
that! Your risk of failure is off the freaking charts already - those capital
sources deepen the downside and add extrinsic risks to your business.

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benologist
If you _really_ need money in a hurry just get a part-time job and work the
minimum you need to / can at it. Even slum it on the rent-a-cheap-x boards
like elance, rentacoder, getafreelancer etc ... you _can_ make money there,
but the work's crap and so is the pay.

I supplement my lack of income from passive income from the 20 or so Flash
games I've produced, donations from my users, and occasionally making more
games that I sell the licensing to / that further increase my passive income.

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keiferski
A few things I'm doing/done:

1\. Selling random stuff on Craigslist and Ebay. Say, that bike trainer is
really cool, but I haven't used it in awhile, and I should go ride outside
anyway. Ditto for every other non-essential item I own.

2\. Setting up a few minor content-type sites. I wrote a bunch of articles
awhile ago and never did anything with them. I'm spending this weekend setting
up a simple wordpress site to host them. Not going to make me rich, obviously,
but anything helps.

3\. Start a minor side business. If you can figure out a way to spend an equal
amount of time (say, 20 hours/week) and make more money than a comparable
random job, do it. You'll learn more and it'll look awesome on a resume. (I'm
doing this too).

4\. I've looked into using AirBnb to host. Not sure if I will end up using it,
but if you've got the space (and the comfort level) you can definitely pay the
rent with it.

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sid6376
Not sure if this helps you, but there is this amazing story of how AirBnB
raised money. "They told us about a great stunt they pulled at the Democratic
Convention in Denver (in which Obama was nominated). They bought a bulk supply
of generic cheerios and made up these cereal boxes to generate seed capital
for their startup" From <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html>

On a side note though consultancy seems a good way to raise that initial
money, i have seen some friends who just get stuck in the consultancy mode and
cant make time to work on products. If you do go that route set a hard date
and stick to it.

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martinshen
If you have development skills and a bit of sales skills. The best way to do
it is to do a web design gig for about $4-10K. DO NOT do anything more complex
than a form on the site as it will just snowball into a ridiculous sized
project. Go to a web tech convention (in Boston, WebInno) and wear a name tag
or shirt that explains that you build kick ass websites. You WILL get
attention.

Our startup did the same thing until recently: do web design consultancy. In
the past 3 months (and next 1) we've saved up (two of us) over $60,000 which
is more than enough for at least a 6month full time run on our web startup.
This on top of building our web startup's prototype and going to Ugrad (and
doing decently I might add). If you have any further questions on how to get
your web design co going in a hurry... pm me.

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jp
I saved a few bucks a month by upgrading my cellphone plan. Old subscription
might result in old price, etc. I use this money to power an Google AppEngine
instance.

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JoshKalkbrenner
In a hurry??? Casino, Scratch-off tickets, pyramid schemes ;)

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code
Cashflow business to fund long term startup.

