Having capital to kick start your business is one of the most important entrepreneurial steps. The foremost step to raising enough capital is by knowing why you need a certain amount of money in the first place. This is important because you need to have adequate finances to run a startup, raising excess money is dangerous just like raising money that will not be good enough to cater for the relevant startup costs.
The second steps is confirming that you have a valuable product or service and an existing market which will pay for your product or service. You do not need a MVP for this or anything other than a valid connection to future customers of your business. Engage them through your market research and ask them if they would pay for your service or products. If there is already competition in the market, then the competition has set a market expectation for how much customers will expect to pay for what you want to offer them. For you to be able to charge you need to add a ton of value to your product. Added value is also a consumer driven operation.
The third step is to outline what an MVP would cost to develop. Typically, the cost of the first MVP is low and can find so many ways to generate enough cash to fund it. Get it built and seek further validation for your company including collecting first revenues from early adopters at a large discount.
Finally, you have to ask yourself one other question. Are you willing to spend most of your time hunting for investors and being rejected or would you rather focus on building your product or service? You cant do both and you need to understand that investors do not put their money in a concept that does not have traction. It rarely happens.
If all of this are green lights, then seeking investment capital and working with your investors will be your full time job but seeking outside investment is really not different from getting your own MVP. You will still be identifying prospects, building presentations, getting rejected a lot, seeking validation and refining what you do.
