Accelerator for Bootstrapped Founders and Solopreneurs

If you're a bootstrapped founder or solopreneur looking for funding, there's not that many options outside of traditional venture capital. So I wanted to share one resource called Tinyseed. Tinyseed's model is a little bit different than traditional venture capital. With traditional VC funding, you're typically looking to invest in high-risk, high-growth companies that have the potential to scale to a billion dollars or more. And in the typical VC model, your investors have a return when you have some kind of exit. So that could mean your company got acquired or went public or you sold the company at some point. Venture capital can be a good option if you're trying to build a high-growth, high-risk startup, but it's not necessarily right for every entrepreneur. And there are a lot of solo founders and bootstrapped founders that just want to build a profitable company, maybe a seven-figure or an eight-figure business, but they don't necessarily want a short-term or short-term exit. So that's where Tinyseed comes in. They're trying to solve that gap in the market in between just like a small business and the high-risk, high-growth businesses that traditional venture capital invest in. So what's different about Tinyseed's model is that they take equity and then they combine that with a dividend. So instead of you having to exit, you can pay out a dividend. And that dividend can go to yourself, but also since Tinyseed becomes part owner in your company, a portion of that dividend can also go to them. So in theory, their incentives should be better aligned with your incentives as the founder. Now, the only thing I don't like about Tinyseed is that they do take a relatively large amount of equity, typically 10 to 12% investment, somewhere between a $120,000 to $220,000 investment. So it may not be right for every founder, but if you're somebody that needs a bit of startup capital to get off the ground and get to profitability, it can be an option for you. Tinyseed's accelerator program, I think they have a deadline of February 17th, so of course do your own homework, check out their website to apply. And just to be clear, I don't have any affiliation with Tinyseed and this is not a sponsored post. But the reason why I feel this topic is important more generally is that as we see more and more solo entrepreneurs and bootstrapped founders, I think it's important to look at alternative funding models. So Tinyseed is one example of somebody that's innovated or tried to innovate around the traditional venture capital model. So I do think it's a really interesting example to look at from that perspective too.