Over the past few years, I have seen a craze in Europe with early-stage VCs backing startup teams that have nothing but an idea. They throw money at them and hope that one or more of them would live to see the light of day. Almost 10 or more years behind USA, I have heard or seen many of these startups, valued at € 1M plus that pretty much kills the appetite of most Business Angels to chip in.

I ask myself this question and in particular in the case of tech/software startups. Do you really need 100K to develop, test, and market your MVP. Today you can build a software platform between 1 to 10K max. I think €10K is even too much. You can do it for much less. 1 to 3K should be your MVP.

We are talking about an MVP. Only one or two modules. In the last startup, we built a pretty big MVP (and I say big because it did more than it should have) and it cost less than €7K. I created a mobile App for just €2K and I had it rebuilt for another €3K. You can get a website for just €250 and a landing page you get for free.

You can actually do so much with all the Freemium SaaS marketing tools that you almost don’t need to pay for your first marketing attempts and if you do, it would be the odd 10 to a few hundred euros.

Surely if you are embarking on an entrepreneurial journey you should be able to put together a few thousand euros. If this was your dream, would you not invest your own money it? If this was your dream and passion would you not do it anyway regardless of investment or not.

To be honest, if you come to me, I would either say let’s do an MVP. I can do it for very little money and then we test to see if it works and if you want marketing money, I want to see that you have built the MVP yourself.

If all you want to do is invest your time and never risk any of your cash or your family’s cash, then the first question that comes to my mind is why should I RISK mine? If you are that unsure then there is something wrong.

If you were sure, if this was your passion, if this was really the big thing you believed in then you would RISK everything you and your family had in order to achieve it.

When it comes to MVP and the early stages, do it yourself, the reward is much higher, the personal satisfaction is much more and if it works you can then go fundraising for marketing money. It is much easier than selling Frankenstein

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