If you think you want to do manufacturing without putting any of your own money, you are dreaming. Banks won’t give you loan and neither would investors. Start something quite small — possibility selling an existing product related to the one you manufacture — and grow along the value chain. Day dreaming is ok, but will not get you anywhere.
If you want to build a services company and don’t have money, don’t worry about it. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg didn’t put great money either. As they built stuff, money came in later.
Here are the steps:
- Learn a great skill of use that a company could readily use. It could be programming, designing, UX, security, content writing etc. Take 2 years and get expertise.
- Find a platform like Upwork where you can find customers for your skills. If they don’t take your skills, you get qualified in skills they like.
- Build something for contract. All great entrepreneurs including Jobs, Zuck and Bill started in services before building hard core products. Make money selling your time and skills.
- Focus on excellent customer service and that would bring further orders very easily. [I had a perfect 5-star rating when long time ago I was in one such platform and had way too many orders than I could manage].
- As the revenue starts rolling in, look for trends, patterns and ways to optimize and automate. Your product ideas come out of that.
- Hire your friends and contacts as you scale.
- If you are doing well at this point, you might get contacts to raise money.
