Here’s a Radical Idea for Funding: Enter a Business Contest
Here’s a radical idea. If you are looking for some funding you never have to repay, consider a business contest.
Contests and competitions designed for entrepreneurs seem to be in vogue these days. At any given time there are dozens of high-profile contests going on.
And the cash prizes in some of them are enough to make you sit up and pay attention - $5,000 is routine. $10,000 a month at Ideablob ups the stakes. And some contests offer more than that for the grand prize winner. For instance, Intuit’s Just Start contest is offering a $50,000 grand prize ($40K in cash and $10K in services).
But as you might imagine, the more money at stake, and what with drawing on large numbers of entrants from the Web, the competition can be pretty stiff. For instance, in the Just Start campaign some of the video entries were clearly the result of many hours, if not days, of work.
For that reason, I suspect many contests are best suited for startup entrepreneurs It’s as if you have to work as hard at the contest entry as you do for your business.
But still, for a business in the right circumstances, it is an interesting alternative source of funding.
