I Want to Start a Business but I Don't Have Money.

I Want to Start a Business but I Don't Have Money is part of Diego Segura's I Want to Start a Business series, so it checks one reason for not starting against the evidence.

You have the idea. You have had it for years. What you do not have is the money, so you are waiting. Here is what the research actually says.

A Harvard professor asked the five hundred fastest-growing companies in America how they had started. The median was around ten thousand dollars, most of it personal savings. Five per cent had venture capital. Two thirds began with no business plan at all. Since 1980, about two companies in every thousand have raised venture capital.

Eleven chapters, one idea each, and each one ends with something you can finish in a single sitting without buying anything. It is written by somebody who has run the experiment both ways: one company started on a six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar cheque from an investor, another on a kitchen mixer on a wooden table in his bedroom. The mixer won.