Entrepreneurs who don’t have limitless investor funding, or personal wealth, often have to go to extremes to keep a new venture afloat: Depleting their savings, forgoing a salary, even selling off assets.
So it’s no surprise that Katlin Smith had to make sacrifices to come up with seed money when she started a natural foods brand Simple Mills out of her Atlanta kitchen in 2012.
“I definitely had to do some very creative things on my own side to fund the business, [like] selling my car and maxing out credit cards and crazy things like that,” Smith recently said on an episode of the “How I Built This” podcast.
Smith struggled to bootstrap the fledgling business for nearly two years until she landed over $2 million in seed funding from institutional investors in 2014. Over that time, Smith poured her life-savings into the business while “talking to anyone and everyone” to drum up interest from potential investors.