As inventors, we’re depending on early-stage funding to make our more advanced inventions come true. It’s high-risk funding, but still, we believe it makes sense for society to bet on new inventions.
When you start your business as a window cleaner, you can pretty much buy a ladder tomorrow and start selling your service.
As inventors, the path is a little longer. We can sell our knowledge as consultants, but if the aim is to bring our own products into the world, a lot of development and testing has to take place before we can create a turnover from the new product or service.
For that reason, we’re very grateful we live in a society which has decided to bet on the ecosystem of startups and investors by helping them secure early-stage funding. In the long run, we believe and this enables they solutions to grow.
Preparing the hockey stick
Development is often a process measured in months or even years when you try to bring a new product to market. It demands immense persistency, and even if you decide to do it without getting paid for your time, you still need cash to produce prototypes – which makes it incredible hard to succeed without any funding.
In the bigger picture, the development is the tip of the hockey stick. And the goal is to start growing really fast once the tip is done – meaning you’ve actually realized an original idea and made it ready for the market.
Without funding, it’s really hard to make it to the crucial turning point. But when done right, the upside when reaching the success-point should be equally big to justify the initial, risky bet.
…and if the idea or product can get either soft-funding or catch the interest from private investors, it might be a great time to ask yourself if the idea is worth pursuing.
Ideas out of the drawer
If our first large project hadn’t been funded by “Forebyggelsesfonden,” we would have struggled so much harder and not been able to realieze nearly as many inventions as we have done – and it is not entirely certain Lolle & Nielsen Inventions would have made it at all. All speculations 🙂
But, amongst other great projects, we secured funding for ‘Smart/Mover’ from the foundation which allowed us to verify the problem, develop the solution in literary steps and finally bring the product to market. And today, several thousand Smart/movers have been sold and thousand of bricklayers backs are spared every day. Thanks to the funding, it actually makes a huge difference for the well being of society.
We have been inventing for 10 years. Multiple times we’ve seen how great ideas got funding and grew into amazing products making a great impact in the market. Products which would never have made it without the initial funding.
Even though it might seem crazy from the outside to fund crazy, unproven ideas, we sincerely hope the State keeps doing it. If not, great ideas will remain in the idea-drawer.