For several years now, walking into a bank looking for a small business loan has been like walking into the desert looking for a drink of water: You might find one, but it’s likely going to be a long walk before you get there.
“We knew that,” said Aidan Augustin, whose start-up company, Feathr, is going on its third year of operation without a dime of help from a bank. “We knew banks would want us to put up collateral and do a lot of things we weren’t going to be comfortable doing, so we didn’t even bother asking them for help.” Instead, Augustin and his college roommate and co-founder, Neal Ormsbe, combined some old-school business funding techniques (tap friends, family and personal savings) with some new-school innovations (enter contests, do crowd-funding, seek grants) to get Feathr crawling and now, finally, walking on its own. “We sort of hopped, skipped and jumped our way around from one funding source to another to get us going,” Augustin said. “Then we started generating some revenue in May, and revenues have kept building up to the point where now we’re self-sustaining.” Read the full entry
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