Entrepreneurship

When it comes to launching your startup, securing the right funding is often the first and most crucial step on your entrepreneurial journey. While venture capital might be the most well-known method of raising capital, it's not the only option. In fact, alternative financing methods have gained popularity in recent years, offering entrepreneurs a diverse range of funding sources. In this blog, we'll explore these alternative financing options and why they might be the perfect fit for your startup.

Crowdfunding:

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe have revolutionized the way startups raise capital. By presenting your idea to a wide audience, you can attract funding from individual backers interested in your project. Crowdfunding is particularly effective for products or projects that have mass appeal and a compelling story.

Pros:

• Access to a large pool of potential backers.
• Testing the market and building a customer base simultaneously.
• Minimal risk as funds are raised from pledges, not loans.

Cons:

• Competition for attention on crowdfunding platforms.
• The need for effective marketing and storytelling.

Angel Investors:

Angel investors are individuals with a high net worth who provide capital to startups in exchange for equity. Unlike venture capitalists, angel investors often take a more hands-on, mentorship-focused approach. They can provide not only funding but valuable industry expertise and connections.

Pros:

• Personalized guidance and mentorship.
• Easier access to funding for early-stage startups.
• Typically quicker decision-making compared to VC firms.

Cons:

• May require giving up equity in your company.
• Finding the right angel investor can be a time-consuming process.

Small Business Loans and Grants:

Government-backed loans and grants are available for entrepreneurs, especially those in specific industries or regions. These funds can be used for a variety of purposes, from research and development to expansion and job creation.

Pros:

• Low-interest rates on loans.
• No equity dilution with grants.
• Support for businesses in various sectors.

Cons:

• Eligibility criteria and paperwork can be complex.
• May involve repayment of loans over time.

Bootstrapping:

Bootstrapping is a method where you fund your startup with your savings, revenue generated from the business, or contributions from friends and family. While it's not an external source of funding, it's worth mentioning because it allows you to maintain complete control over your venture.

Pros:

• No equity or debt obligations to third parties.
• Complete control over your business decisions.
• Minimal risk, as you are using your own resources.

Cons:

• Limited financial resources, which may slow growth.
• Potential personal financial risk.

Corporate Partnerships and Strategic Alliances:

Forming partnerships with established companies in your industry can provide access to their resources, expertise, and customer base. This can be a non-traditional but highly valuable way to fund your startup.

Pros:

• Access to resources and expertise.
• Validation of your business concept.
• Potential for joint marketing and sales efforts.

Cons:

• Finding the right partner can be challenging.
• Careful negotiation of terms and expectations is necessary.

Conclusion:

Venture capital is not the only route to financing your startup. Alternative financing methods offer a diverse array of options to suit your business's unique needs. From crowdfunding to angel investors, small business loans to strategic alliances, there's a solution for every entrepreneurial vision. Explore these alternatives, weigh their pros and cons, and choose the funding option that aligns best with your startup's goals and trajectory. Remember, the right source of funding can make all the difference in your entrepreneurial journey.

Yes, you can set up your start up and achieve success even in these turbulent times – if you start right, go in the right direction and identify the right people tools, technology and partner.

If you have confidence in your small business idea, now is the right time to leap into entrepreneurship. It’s crucial to consider the economic climate of your country as well the world when outlining your business plan. So, how do you start your business and achieve success on the heels of a global pandemic?

In 2021, around 75.5 million people quit their jobs as part of the ‘Great Resignation,’ says Forbes. Some people quit due to health concerns, others left because of their bad management, but a record number decided to start their own business. With a strategic and well-thought-out business plan, you can harness your passion, establish a business, and attain your goals during these turbulent times.

Begin with a Solid Plan
A good plan is the foundation of a good company. A new small business can create great value in niche markets that bigger companies don’t serve during the COVID era. So, find your niche and start drafting the plan strategically. Your plans should include both your short-term and long-term goals. While your short-term plan should chalk out what and how you are going to do in detail, the long-term plan should focus on growing your start up steadily and quickly.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Networking
Professional networking is the way ahead. Start strengthening your professional connections because your network will help push your business to the next level. Word-of-mouth promotion has never been stronger and more effective. Today, around 88% of people trust online customer reviews just as they trust suggestions from family and friends. Networking also helps you attract the right talent to your team. So start building your online network for all the right reasons.

So how do you start networking?
Begin with strengthening your LinkedIn profile and joining relevant groups there. Also, try to attend dedicated networking events in-person in your industry.

Go Digital

In today’s hyper-competitive digital world, it’s nearly impossible to start and grow a business without establishing a solid online presence. Lakhs of businesses closed for good during the pandemic, but many flourished by concentrating efforts on building their robust online community. During such an online boom, startups must find and leverage the right digital tools and technologies to thrive. Take advantage of digital marketing, social media marketing and content marketing techniques to reach the right audience at the right time through the right platform. Email marketing is another reasonable yet rewarding tool to explore.

Be Trendy

To stay ahead of the curve, you need to constantly pivot and keep up with the latest trends in your industry. There are thousands of companies that go extinct just because they failed to keep up with what was trending in their field. Make sure that you’re constantly studying your competitors’ moves and keeping up with the trends. Don’t react to every change, but very strategically react to the right changes.

Invest in Your Future

As your startup begins to be matured, you’ll have to shift focus to its expansion and long-term growth. You’ll need to prepare your organization and employees to scale up operations, which often demands the help of external agencies, as you can’t set up internal teams for each and every requirement. At this stage, you should consider hiring professional service providers to meet your additional requirements and tie-up with business leaders to guide your organization in the right direction.

The key to success is ‘adapting to change,’ and the pandemic is no anomaly to this. Entrepreneurs that want to succeed have to be very adaptable to change, maintain a healthy balance, and be surrounded by the right people. Even with these effective tips in place, there are never any guarantees of success. Startup failure is extremely common, but by adopting these strategies, you can increase your chances of success.

Pipeline caching can help reduce build time by allowing the outputs or downloaded dependencies from one run to be reused in later runs, reducing or avoiding the cost to recreate or redownload the same files again.

Recently, we at Pyramid Consulting started DevOps for our projects, one of the existing features on DevOps is CI/CD, and to implement the same we used the pipeline. Currently, we are using it in the Angular project, so the following are tasks we performed in Agent to deploy/build the code. So, let’s consider this as a default agent pipeline.

Now when we run this pipeline

While using hosted build agents; each time a build is triggered a new VM is allocated thus any previously cached npm packages are lost. So, whenever the pipeline runs, it downloads the npm package before the build. This will spike the network and build cost, and we have also remembered the deployment is in DevOps is not fully free.

Now, the question is how can we overcome the same? There are a couple of ways to do this; one is Self-Hosted Agent and the other is Artifacts but the simplest and most effective what I feel in this scenario is “Cache Task” introduced by Microsoft.

As Per Microsoft “Caching is especially useful in scenarios where the same dependencies are downloaded over and over at the start of each run” So we added “Cache Task” in our project and run the build again.

Now, if you compare with the earlier Pipeline, you will see one additional task “Cache” and configure the same. We will discuss configuration a little later, for now, let’s see what changes. When we run Pipeline, the very first time you don’t see any changes as we start caching initially and there won’t be any cache hence no changes in execution time.

Now comes the magic time, when you execute the pipeline a second time, now compare npm install from 5 minutes to 26 seconds and total pipeline execution time from 10 minutes to 3 minutes we save almost 70% time of build execution.

It is worth noting that caching is currently supported in CI and deployment jobs, but not in classic release jobs.

This is the digital age that we live in and the way business is conducted today is very progressive. There are always fresh ideas and new innovations that keep sprouting up to accustom to the radical change. With many innovations now emerging, businesses continuously adopting new tools and technologies, and entrepreneurs investing their time and resources in growing their business further contributing to the economy of the nation, such efforts need to be recognized and awarded.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) is one such platform that recognizes the achievements and contributions of business visionaries. The SEBA 2018 ceremony, which was held at on 14 November 2018 at the Grand Ballroom, Palace of the Golden Horses, Malaysia, recognized and acknowledged the achievements of the country’s leading business visionaries across all sectors of industry and their contributions to economic development. The award ceremony was held for the third consecutive year this year.

The SEBA 2018 has showcased exemplary individuals, thought leaders, successful entrepreneurs and companies who are game-changers in various disciplines. Among the recipients of the most prestigious SEBA awards were leaders who have successfully transformed their organizations and created inspiring legacies to be emulated by others. The awards also honored those eminent entrepreneurs from Malaysia who have shown strong business and thought leadership, those who leveraged on technology innovation for the greater good and expanded their business successfully across the region.

During the event, the SEBA Business Club made its inaugural launch. It is mainly aimed at supporting Malaysia’s SME business landscape by harnessing the experience and expertise of both past and current award recipients. This exclusive business club brings together the crème de la crème of the country’s top SMEs and entrepreneurs to empower the exclusive grouping of the elite and like-minded business community. The synergistic platform connects and allows for greater collaboration amongst its members and promotes not just business-only activities but also links to various NGOs and CSR programs to ignite alliances and successful business propositions.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) was set up as an initiative to not only recognize Malaysia’s outstanding entrepreneurs and enterprises but to also uncover growing talents and upcoming companies that are transforming the face of industries they operate in. SEBA, which is held annually under the auspices of MyPreneurship, was also designed and catered with entrepreneurs in mind, bridging industry player and stakeholders, while providing a platform to connect, communicate and collaborate.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards is a company or individual's partner for its growth, opportunities, and sustenance. Award categories are based on best merit, depending on accomplishments and track records. These are selected by the Jury upon a complete audit and review process, involving both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks. The awards are usually for Entrepreneurs and Startups, for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and for National Icons and Conglomerates, including MNCs.

With the variety of awards out in the market today, deciding which ones to enter could be
challenging! Could it be more of a hassle than a potential business gain? Here are five reasons why nominating for the much anticipated annual SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) will benefit your business.

1. Improve Employee Motivation

Awards are a fantastic way to recognize the hard work and achievements of your employees. It
provides a way to focus on the success of the company and a feel-good factor coupled with a sense of pride. Besides celebrating the victory of winning the awards, employees can also be treated to a glitzy awards dinner which can yield networking opportunities.

2. An opportunity to attract new business

We’ll let that quote speak for itself. A prestigious business award win can not only help give your
business that seal of quality but also act as a good third-party endorsement for your brand. It also gives a stamp of authority and credibility within your industry peers and makes for a great talent enticement. Pitch yourself as the best and attract only the best talents to push your business forward.

3. Free marketing

Improve your brand awareness and promote your business to new and potential customers by
maximizing a business award win. Include the prestigious award logo as part of all your marketing collateral and celebrate employee’s hard work and success by identifying PR opportunities. It’s fantastic to be recognized so it’s important to make sure that people know what your business has achieved. Winning a business award can also open doors to getting contracts, finding new supply channels and breaking into new markets.

4. Networking and reputation reinforcement

For SME’s, awards are undoubtedly the best way to not only showcase the caliber of the work that is being done but to also rub shoulders with the very best of the business community. Being shortlisted(or winning) will improve client retention, and assuredly send your clients home chatting to their friends about how great you are. And, as we all know, word of mouth and personal recommendation is still the most influential factor in the business world today.

5. Benchmark against your peers

Prestigious business awards are the perfect platform to come out of your corporate shell, show off that perfectly executed marketing campaign or business strategy and set yourself high among industry peers. The process of applying for the award itself could help you think about ways you could be doing things better and with that, be able to identify areas for improvement within your business. A winning application would force you and your team to think of ways to stand out from the competition whether it’s through innovation, diversity, growth or even people development. More often than not, that benefit to your business itself would outweigh the award prize itself.

We are about to witness a major evolution of mobile technology in the next couple of years with 5G going to become the most anticipated next-generation mobile network. The previous generations like 3G and 4G were a breakthrough in the communications. While 3G receives a signal from the nearest phone tower for phone calls, messaging and data, 4G also works the same, but with a faster internet connection, i.e., it allows people to access data about 10 times faster than 3G.

Their successor, the next generation telecommunications standards, 5G, will allow for faster transfer of data, quicker response time by reducing latency or the amount of time taken to transfer data from device to device and also allow more devices to connect to the internet with better functionalities. Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Ericsson, and BT have already begun forming 5G partnerships and investing to research into 5G and its application. In a notable advancement, Ericsson and Nokia have even developed 5G platforms earlier last year aiming to provide the first 5G radio system and end-to-end 5G support for mobile carriers respectively.

Earlier last week on Jan 25, 2018, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) has announced “5G Pioneer Initiative” at the 2018 Qualcomm Technology Day in Beijing, China. The 5G Pioneer Initiative aims to explore ways towards mobile technology innovations in the 5G era. At the event, Qualcomm announced partnerships with six leading Chinese manufacturers by signing memorandums of understanding for sales worth at least $2 billion over 3 years. The “5G Pioneer” initiative includes Lenovo, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Wingtech that have expressed their interest in working together to accelerate the availability of 5G devices in China and support China’s smartphone industry for the global opportunities.

Representatives from Lenovo Group Ltd., Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corp. Ltd, vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd, Xiaomi Communications Co. Ltd, ZTE Corp., and Wingtech Technology Co. Ltd, joined Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon on stage to give support to working together on this initiative. Speaking on the occasion, Cristiano Amon said, “5G will bring massive new opportunities to the mobile industry, and we are excited to work with these manufacturers on this 5G Pioneer Initiative. The president of Qualcomm further added saying, “Qualcomm Technologies has close relationships within China’s mobile and semiconductor ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work with this ecosystem to drive innovation as we move from the 3G/4G era to the 5G era.”

In a recent 5G Consumer Survey conducted by Qualcomm Technologies, it showed that 60% of Chinese consumers are likely to purchase 5G smartphones when available. This clearly indicates that Chinese mobile users are showing an unprecedented interest in 5G. This further gives a scope for innovation and development in the Chinese mobile industry and opportunities for the global mobile landscape. Through the “5G Pioneer Initiative”, Qualcomm Technologies will extend support to the Chinese manufacturers to create brand new 5G mobile phone experiences for users around the world by providing comprehensive solutions such as the radiofrequency front-end.

Let say you are a busy professional or a frequent traveler and have no time or want to save your time with the travel research or the booking process, and if you’re wondering how to do it, then here’s a good news for you. Mezi app does it all for you; it takes care of all your travel research and presents you with options to compare. It is a personal assistant for all things related to travel, flights, and hotels. Here’s the story of the twin brothers who developed this app and later made millions by selling it to American Express.

The Pune-born twins, Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde, co-founders of travel assistant startup Mezi, developed the artificial intelligence-powered travel app in 2015. This app allows travelers to simply text their requests for flights, hotels, or restaurant reservations. Upon texting, Mezi then provides recommendations, best options and makes travel arrangements for the customers at their request who can then finalize the bookings. Mezi uses artificial intelligence (AI) and human expertise to personalize online travel discovery and booking experience. By learning travelers’ preferences and understanding the way customers make requests using natural language, Mezi gets smarter and more efficient over time.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has 45 of its 60 employees based in Pune and Mumbai. Swapnil and Snehal Shinde, have previously launched Dhingana, the Indian streaming music service that was later acquired by US Rdio in 2014. Using their expertise and the algorithm they built at Dhingana for throwing up the right recommendations to users, the Shinde siblings then created Mezi app. This app was initially created as a one-stop solution for shopping as a virtual shopping assistant. Later, Mezi has found success as a chatbot-led virtual travel assistant since its 2016 pivot. Since then, it says 100,000 users have downloaded the app to book flights and make hotel and restaurant reservations.

Nexus Ventures Partners is an early investor in Mezi which put $2.5 million in December 2015. The company also developed $9-million fund-raise in July 2016, which saw participation from Saama Capital and American Express Ventures, the strategic investment arm of American Express. The travel category turned out to be the most successful and in November 2016 Mezi pivoted to focus solely on flights, hotels and restaurant bookings. In addition to its iOS and Android app, Mezi also offered a white-label “travel-as-a-service” solution for travel agents.

The twin brothers have just sold Mezi, their second startup, to American Express in an all-cash deal estimated at $125-150 million. American Express on January 30, 2018, announced that it has acquired Mezi, a personal travel assistant app. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. “With messaging emerging as the channel of choice for many, and the demand for unique experiences increasing, we believe the combination of Mezi’s capabilities with our global network of expert travel counselors creates a differentiated, high-touch service experience for our card members,” said Phil Norman, Vice President of American Express Digital Labs in an announcement. However, the company’s co-founders will continue to lead Mezi and report to Norman.

No sooner did Amazon, the largest internet retailer in the world, launched “Key”, a smart door lock and security camera service system, in last October, has now acquired Ring, a smart doorbell maker, for more than $1 billion. According to reports, this is Amazon’s second largest acquisition after it bought Whole Foods Market for $13 billion. Amazon on 27 February 2018, said that it had acquired Ring, a maker of internet-connected doorbells and cameras, taking a deep dive into the home security business.

Earlier, Amazon has sent shock waves to the world by moving into the home security and automation space. It has partnered with lock manufacturers Kwikset and Yale and introduced its new in-home delivery service, Amazon Key. This is a service that uses the Amazon-made cloud cam to record the delivery personnel entering the home and lets the authorized people into the home with a unique unlock code through one of a few compatible smart locks by Kwikset and Yale.

While Key works through a keyless mobile phone technology, the smart doorbells from Ring offer similar services as Key. Ring, the maker of video doorbells and other smart-home technology, records live videos of customers’ doorsteps and homes and then sends the videos to their smartphones to assure security to people’s homes. This acquisition is expected to add to Amazon’s home security business. However, Ring is not the first home security firm that Amazon has bought in the last six months. Very recently, in December, Amazon even acquired Blink, a rival to Ring, which also makes smart doorbells.

Ring, the California-based startup, was founded six years ago with a single product called Ring Video Doorbell. It is a WiFi-enabled video doorbell that allows users(house owners) to monitor their front doors using an app on their smartphones. A built-in motion detector alerts users whenever a visitor arrives at their stoops and gives them the option to see, hear and speak to guests before they let them in. The company has since introduced other products, including security cameras, home alarms, WiFi-enabled smoke detectors, and flood sensors. In the last year, the company was said to have raised over $109 million in funding, valuing the company at about half a billion dollars.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that Amazon has partnered with Ring. Earlier, the e-commerce company has invested in Ring through its Alexa Fund, which supports startups that integrate their products with Alexa. Ring’s devices currently work with Alexa, virtual assistant of Amazon, by showing users camera feeds on Echo Show devices after hearing commands from the users.

Amazon is already into home automation hub and popularized smart home gadgets with its Echo products, which allow customers to control thermostats, cameras, door locks, lights, and other connected devices. With this acquisition, the online giant will be pushing deeper into the smart home services and home-security business to gain a strong foothold in the market. Currently, Amazon’s market value is more than $700 billion. Its stock price just exceeded $1,500, surging nearly 30% in 2018.

This is an era of startups and it gives me immense joy to know and learn about the young talents that come up with their innovations to infuse their thoughts and talents into building products that set them apart. Amazed by such revolutions, I developed the zeal to acknowledge their efforts and contributions to the global economy. Few such startups that captivated my thoughts and made me freeze in wonder are those which started with almost little money or no money, yet grew out to become famous startups making a huge turnover. I would like to list out those few startups that made billions of dollars becoming the focus.

1. Stripe

Stripe is an American online payment gateway service provider covering over 25 different countries. It was founded in 2010 by Irish entrepreneurs Patrick and John Collison. It allows individuals as well as large enterprises to perform integrated online payment using their credit card or any other major online payment method. Its major focus on providing fraud prevention has given it a $9.2 billion valuation. In 2016, Stripe was ranked number four on the Forbes magazine Cloud 100, a list of companies that engage in cloud computing. In 2017, Stripe was ranked number one on the Forbes Cloud 100.

2. DigitalOcean

The American cloud infrastructure provider, headquartered in New York City, was founded in 2011 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky and has data centers worldwide. Now serving more than 50,000 companies and 700,000 users, DigitalOcean competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and generates billion dollars revenue annually. DigitalOcean, the cloud of developers, was named to Forbes 2016 Cloud 100 List. It was recognized as one of the World’s Top 100 Private Cloud Companies for a second consecutive year in 2017.

3. Slack

Founded in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services. Post its inception, it didn’t take too long for the company to set a new record by becoming the fastest startup ever to achieve a $1 billion valuation. When the company was just two-years-old, is valued at over $1 billion and was already used by more than 30,000 teams. Past 2017 summer, Slack raised a whopping $250 million funding round at a $5 billion valuation.

Former Unicorns in the Billion Dollar Club

4. Braintree Payments

The Chicago-based company and a division of PayPal, Braintree Payments is a payment service provider that specializes in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies. Founded in 2007 by Bryan Johnson, Braintree in the later years came up with advanced fraud protection services that include tools to help businesses detect and prevent fraudulent transactions while approving more orders. Within four years of its inception, Braintree raised $69 million in venture capital later paramount to an $800 million acquisition.

5. Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment was later launched as Shopify in 2006. Within four years, the Canadian e-commerce platform received $7 million and $15 million in a series of venture capital financing generating a huge revenue. They eventually earned billion-dollar valuation from VCs and IPOs with a revenue of $580.9 million as of 2017.

6. Shutterstock

Headquartered in New York City, Shutterstock is an American stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools provider, founded in 2003. American entrepreneur and computer programmer, Jon Oringer, created his own online marketplace by initially uploading 30,000 of his own stock photos and made them available via subscription. Gradually, acquiring a handful of other companies like Bigstock, WebDAM, Rex Features and PremiumBeat, to name a few, and partnership with Facebook, the company raised a billion-dollar revenue making Oringer a billionaire.