Bill Harding

Bill Harding: Some people like fundraising. I'm not one of them. Running a profitable company for the past year has afforded me the luxury to wake up every morning and say to my mirror: “What would you most like to do today, you cunning devil, you?”

On an average day, “talk to investors” would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of “take a multivitamin” and “backup my hard drive” on that list. It was something that I knew ought to be done, but being one of the most time-consuming and unpleasant-sounding choices on my list, it didn’t stand a chance competing against 100 exciting ways to build a better product.

At first I felt guilty about this. I take seriously my responsibility to keep Bonanzle as the fastest growing marketplace online, and, knowing that most of our competitors had raised $1 million to $5 million before even launching always gave me the nagging sense that “doing what I most wanted to do” was costing my business growth.

But as year one of Bonanzle became year two, I noticed something that surprised me about our funded competitors: they were still feature-poor, UI-poor, and customer-poor. Meanwhile, our monthly sales growth, as just a two person company, continued to outpace any online marketplace since Etsy.

It was then that I consciously adopted what my girlfriend would later refer to as “the jellyfish approach to fundraising.”

The premise: that if you love what you’re building, it’s either going to keep growing, or it’s going to become a total disaster that you enjoyed being a part of. And if you’re fortunate enough to find it’s the former, then eventually money will find its way to your company, just as plankton find their way into a jellyfish’s gastrovascular cavity .

There is a happy corollary for those that adopt the Jellyfish Approach: that it will tend to waste less of your life.

As any funded entrepreneur can attest, it is much harder to build a successful product than it is to raise money. Show me a determined entrepreneur with a mediocre idea and six months to spare, and I’ll show you a funded company.

Should the entrepreneur happen to possess people skills, or a good/trendy idea (group discount site, anyone?), you can cut that time in half.

Post-funding, you are now, as Bear Grylls says every time he stupidly jumps down a mine shaft: “committed.”

If, by cruel twist of fate, the profits you drunkenly estimated in your spreadsheet late at night do not materialize like the gin swore they would, a room of unhappy investors with hard questions await.

Maybe your company should zig? Or zag? Double back then loop-de-loop?

There will be many opinions, and so there will be many meetings. This is why I took more than a reasonable amount of time to decide if Bonanzle really had so damn much potential that I wanted to be doing it for the next several years.

If I didn’t have a trove of data that proved this was a product with world-changing potential, I would keep building until I had that data. I didn’t want to look back on my prime as a time when I sat in a lot of meetings trying to band-aid a product that nobody could be certain would work. So what are the right circumstances under which to exit bootstrap mode?

For Bonanzle, I required 1) a world-class investor group that would make my life easier-not-harder 2) a proven product that could sell itself without my help and 3) a clear understanding of the direct benefit that a capital infusion would provide.

If you have a great product, funding will in time find your company. And if you are a hard worker that wakes up every morning, determined to build whatever gets you charged up that day, a great product will in time find you.

[Jellyfish photo via Rooneg]

Bill Harding is the founder of Bonanzle, an e-commerce marketplace which raised $1 million in venture financing last week. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff. [Editor's note: The next TechFlash Live event -- to be held June 15th -- will be a Town Hall summit on startup funding. Details here.]