The best world startups who have not asked anyone for money
Now the term “startup” will surprise no one – surely everyone has friends who have opened their anti-cafe, built a quadrocopter for aerial photography or selling interesting articles on the Internet. Despite some differences from the traditional business, when creating a startup, the future entrepreneur faces the same question – starting capital.
Startup support is a whole industry. States create technology parks and venture capital funds, large universities are engaged in business incubators. Venture funds (from the English. Venture – venture venture, gamble) are engaged in investments in enterprises with high risks, expecting from them no less high profits.
In addition, more experienced entrepreneurs themselves help startups – surely you have heard about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing? One of the goals of these movements is the collective collection of money to finance start-ups. As a rule, this happens through the Internet, for example, using the Kickstarter site. Startups expose their projects there and indicate the necessary amount of money and time. If the required amount of donations is accumulated by the due date, the money is transferred to the startup, otherwise contributions will be sent back. Other crowdfunding sites work according to the similar scheme.
However, do large investments guarantee the success of the project? After all, the idea is just a small part of the result, the main thing is competent management and a clear understanding of the goal. The practice has a huge number of failed startups. And the lack of money in the list of reasons for the failure – not in the first place. Most often, projects fail due to improper progress or when entering a saturated market.
However, there are projects that can unwind without investing venture capital investments. In this case, you need a combination of several factors – an easy-to-use product, a saturated market and good promotion. Consider the examples of such startups.
It would seem that with the development of SMM marketing in social networks, emails will remain only in the Spam folder. But no, e-mail marketing continues to evolve, an example of this is the MailChimp service. It has ready-made solutions for integration with CMS and tools such as Google Docs and Google Analytics, MailChimp panel can be embedded in Facebook.
Nice add-ons MailChimp is an online newsletter editor and built-in image hosting.
This year, MailChimp took advantage of the millionth client, which certainly indicates the success of the application.
MailChimp has an unusual payment method – as long as the number of your subscribers is less than 2000, and the number of letters is less than 12,000 per month, you can use the service for free, then you have to pay – the minimum MailChimp tariff is $ 10 per month.
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The project management tool of a small company for 3-4 people was also created without attracting large funds. Basecamp allows you to discuss information about the client and the project (there are even comments), maintain the project schedule and take into account the time spent on it.
The developers of Basecamp claim that they are not going to complicate the tool to be able to use it in large companies, because the main advantage of Basecamp is its simplicity and compliance with the wishes of customers. Basecamp can be considered a successful example of promotion through blogs – its creators did not spend on traditional marketing.
Initially, the Basecamp team (then 37signals) included three people. Now the company employs 44 people, with many of them scattered around the world and working remotely. The main office is located in Chicago.
GitHub is the largest web service for hosting and collaborating on IT projects. In general, GitHub can be considered a social network for developers – here you can not only upload the code, but also communicate, discuss it. There is also a small wiki encyclopedia.
The application, which successfully complemented Twitter with the ability to upload photos, was estimated at $ 10 million in 2011. What ensures such a success? First of all, this tool is very convenient for civilian journalists – he took a fresh informational guide on the phone, and after a few moments millions of people can familiarize themselves with it. Secondly, TwitPic perfectly integrates with Twitter – you can use the same username and password.
