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Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Both Sides of the Table

You have to understand whether they’re likely to yield revenue growth in the near term OR whether you have access to cheap enough capital to fund your losses until your investments pay off. They have have raised $2-3 million, built a product that has some amount of market traction and got to annualized revenues of around $1 million.

Startup 418
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Startups Should Make Their First Dollar Before They Raise Their First Dollar

ReadWriteStart

The answer to the age-old question of whether your business should be trying to make money or raise money is almost universally the latter. Generating solid revenue streams early on will make many of the fundraising problems much easier to handle later on. 4 Reasons to Focus on Revenue Before Fundraising. More Leverage.

Startup 130
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Instead of sticking a fork in the venture market, realize. there is no fork

This is going to be BIG.

How else can you explain this headline matching a story about a professional social network still trying to explore revenues raising $17mm on an $80mm valuation? venture capitalists are now asking tougher questions about start-ups' revenue and profits.". Perhaps I need to rethink that. But second, how do you back this up?

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Startups Should Make Their First Dollar Before They Raise Their First Dollar

ReadWriteStart

The answer to the age-old question of whether your business should be trying to make money or raise money is almost universally the latter. Generating solid revenue streams early on will make many of the fundraising problems much easier to handle later on. 4 Reasons to Focus on Revenue Before Fundraising. More Leverage.

Startup 78
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10 Types of Nonprofit Grants: Does Your Organization Qualify for Funding?

Board Effect

Start-up Grants or Seed Money Grants — Start-up grants are hard to come by, but they exist. Capacity-building grants give you the revenue to do more with what you already have and the projects you have already started. While government grants are a good start, you might have better luck looking elsewhere for a grant.

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How to Start a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

They all use the same simple-minded model.They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how todo database matches instead of how dating works in the real world.An Andyet theres a lot of money at stake. Usually you get seed money from individual rich people called"angels." This money isnt revenue.

Startup 105
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To Follow On or Not to Follow On

This is going to be BIG.

In the late 90's, it wasn't surprising that companies with no revenue that were funded at 100 million dollar valuations didn't survive. What I'm not good at--or, rather, simply haven't done yet, is sit on a board for seven years helping a company go from $20mm in revenue to $100 million in revenue. I'm sticking to what I know.