Entrepreneur’s Feeding Themselves?

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

Entrepreneurs eat what they kill. Bootstrapping and creating something from nothing, however, can be a long, lonely, penniless road. Depending on the business, it can take months, maybe even years, to bootstrap and grow a new business to the point it can pay it’s founders a decent salary. In the meantime, how do these technology entrepreneurs put ‘food on the table’?

huntPaying the bills while bootstrapping doesn’t necessarily require charity or funding. I’ve always been curious if we can build a viable means of applying the unique insight and skills that a software entrepreneur has to real business problems and opportunities?

This is different than fund raising. Choosing to raise money for your new business is a different decision and independent of this. This past week at our Founder’s Club, we brainstormed a rough positioning statement for this…

For regional mid-sized companies
who are limited by their IT department, are technologically challenged, looking for innovation
our product is short-term entrepreneur-in-residence
that provides objectivity, expertise, and fresh perspective
unlike strategy consultants trying to sell long, big projects
we have assembled a way to distill problems into sustainable small innovation packages

Are there enough businesses out there who recognize the need to have entrepreneurial insight and skills within their walls? If so, could we grow this into a program that provides a short-term living for active entrepreneurs as they grow the revenue in their company?

I’m curious if anyone’s heard of a program like this or even better, works in a company that is a potential customer? Comment below or contact me directly.