

Ask HN: Ask for money before having a prototype? - TiagoP

What are the chances of getting money before having a working prototype? In other words, having the idea only.
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akalsey
Ideas are cheap. Everyone has them, and most have more than one. The ability
to make something work is a whole different matter.

As an investor, you're determining risk vs reward. How much risk is there that
I'll give my money to this guy and not ever get anything back?

If you have a prototype to play with, you at least know that the entrepreneur
is capable of building his idea.

If you have actual users using the prototype, you know the entrepreneur is
capable of building something others want.

And if you have any _paying_ users, even if they aren't paying much, you you
know the entrepreneur has been able to build something that people want bad
enough to pay for.

Each of these steps is a reduction is risk.

The more risk an investor has, the less likely they are to invest. And if they
DO invest, the more expensive their money is going to be. Anyone willing to
invest in just an idea is going to want a lot more of your company for their
investment, because they're absorbing a lot more risk than the entrepreneur.

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vaksel
0

unless you are friends with the investor, and he just helps you out because he
feels obligated since you are his friend.

The 5-6 months you'd spend chasing funding are much better spent coding a
prototype/final product

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brk
It would likely depend on the scope and scale of the idea, and how you go
about proving that you can be successful at implementation.

If your idea is geared around a web-app, your chances are probably pretty
small. It's easy to put together the basics of a demo, and anyone who did not
put in that minimal effort would likely be met with skepticism.

If your idea is something like a complex new mesh networking algorithm and
chipset... well, most investors wouldn't expect you to have developed a new
ASIC out of your own pocket ;) However, you would likely need a very solid
track record in the technology and other applications of it (eg: work at
another company, research lab, etc.).

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alain94040
You can spend the next 6 months of your life knocking on investors' doors with
just your idea, and have nothing to show for it.

Or you can spend the next 6 months to hack an ugly prototype. You'll be amazed
how much further along you are.

That's because in the second scenario, you actually _did_ something. That has
value. It may not be your final product, but you'll learn so much more than
tweaking the template on your powerpoint deck.

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mark_l_watson
Wow, please don't take this badly, but: if you don't have a few prototypes,
how can you really know what works and what doesn't for your general ideas?

Definitely, build a few experimental systems and get feedback from them. With
frameworks like Rails and Django, the cost of prototyping is small.

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anamax
Suppose that you were being approached to invest your money, how would you
react to a "great idea" vs a "it's not done, and it's ugly, but let me show
you what it does"?

