Ask HN: What should you do when you have an idea but no money to fund it?

5 points by akritrime ↗ HN
I and a few friends had an idea recently that most probably won't change the world but, if executed properly, can help people and small businesses in smaller towns compete with the bigger names. Problem is as we started working on this idea, we realized we will need a considerable amount of money (maybe not a lot by Western standards, but a lot to us) to get even a working prototype that people can just use. Most of us are barely adults, not industry veterans, so no one would fund us without a working prototype, we don't have the capacity to fund it ourselves. What should we do in such a case? Shelf the idea, come back sometime later when we can afford?

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Most external investment opportunities will normally require you to show them a business plan, risk analysis, market research and more. The following are a few ways to fund this:

Get fundings from the government, they offer grants or loans.

Get funding from an educational institution.

Get funding from a private or public corporation.

Get fundings from a bank or credit union.

Get investors or start a non-profit and get donations.

Self fund the growth and engineering of the idea with your own income later on.

Get fundings from family and friends.

Need money to do what? We may be able to offer workarounds if you are more specific
Mostly for hosting the services.
Does it make sense to back the product with a crypto token? You can sell those to raise funds
Crypto is part of our plan, we are actually exploring it.
you can do ERC tokens via ethereum, it's very easy to make your own, but you are limited to the ethereum ecosystem. or you can make your own coin from scratch, which takes a lot of effort and time, but may be worth more in the long-term.