It’s going to be friggin’ expensive: How to get funding

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Entrepreneurship

Carolina Contreras Issa

June 11, 2024

2 min

You’ve excitedly gone through the market validation steps and have a better idea of what pain points your product is going to address. You’re very excited about your app and all the possibilities and joys it will bring to your life, and your customers’ lives, and you want to get started right away. You think to yourself, let’s get a software development team and get going! Not so fast.

Building software is ✨EXPENSIVE✨

Read that again.

Would you rather spend $100k+ on an app with all the bells and whistles that your consumers may or may not use or would you rather spend $30k on an app where your clients tell you what they want to see in addition to what is there/what they think you should take out?

There are many different elements (that we will cover as we go along in these series) that need to happen in order for you to walk away with an MVP that makes software development so expensive. Now, please keep in mind that an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) is NOT a ‘completed, fully implemented’ app… and if you think about it… no app is ever completed 🤔 And there are maintenance costs like security updates, version updates, server costs, and file storage fees.

An MVP is the first iteration for your app. It will only contain the most relevant features for your target market so that you can quickly have something tangible to show your consumers and be able to iterate on it quicker and at less cost. Iteration is your best friend.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk funding.

Over the years, I have personally found that entrepreneurs typically have between $15,000 to $20,000 saved up for their MVP. In most cases, this is very tight and leaves very little room for change. Plus, our clients are forced to radically prioritize what features get to stay and which ones need to go (for now). And in most cases, there isn’t enough money left to keep iterating on the app once they’ve received feedback and everything comes to a halt. In my experience as a project manager and developer, once a project comes to a halt for a couple of months and starts up again there is always an upfront cost in having developers get re-acquainted with the project and codebase again.

After having a mini existential crisis and banging your head against the wall you may be wondering “Great. How do I get funding then?”. I’m glad you asked.

Aside from the obvious suggestions such as “get another job”, “partner with friends/family”, “Get crowdfunding”, we’ve compiled a list of resources you can access to get funding for your project. Check them out below: