The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers’ Cash

Author: John Mullins (Author)

Edition: 1st

Language: English

Publisher: Wiley

Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.2 x 9 inches

ISBN-10: 111887885X

ISBN-13: 978-1118878859

Publication Date: July 21, 2014

Print Length: 304 pages

Description: Who needs investors? More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VCs, business angels, incubators and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered to their investors and the astonishingly large companies that their ecosystem has created.

But the vast majority of fast-growing companies never take any venture capital. So where does the money come from to start and grow their companies? From a much more agreeable and hospitable source, their customers. That’s exactly what Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Banana Republic’s Mel and Patricia Ziegler did to get their companies up and running and turn them into iconic brands.

In The Customer Funded Business, best-selling author John Mullins uncovers five novel approaches that scrappy and innovative 21st century entrepreneurs working in companies large and small have ingeniously adapted from their predecessors like Dell, Gates, and the Zieglers:

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