Have you heard of surveymonkey or boomerang?  Most likely you have received more than one email message asking you to take a survey and providing you with a link to it. 

There are many options available today for conducting your own research—either for free or at a very low cost.  There are examples below this article of survey software readily available online. The first list includes products to help you create and conduct your own brief survey for no charge. All these companies also offer more enhanced survey software capability for modest fees. The second list links to survey software products with relatively low cost options. You can even add a single question to your own website for a simple poll you’d like to offer visitors. Most have varying degrees of support for the user based upon pricing packages you can select.

A fair bit of entrepreneurial energy (at least when I am meeting with entrepreneurs) centers on getting equity capital.  Now, putting aside the limited sample size of people meeting with me because Amplifier has money to invest in their businesses, it does appear to me that most entrepreneurs I meet are making the assumption that the best way to grow their business is to obtain venture capital.  Well, I am not sure that for most of them I agree.  Actually, for most start ups and emerging businesses, venture capital should be the financing source of last resort. 

I am not saying this because venture capital (or the denizens of the industry) are “bad”, rather I am suggesting this because venture capital is a particular financing tool for a particular type of business. There are moments of time when a company is best suited for venture capital and many more times when it is not.  And, more to the point, venture capital money is very, very expensive.  So, even in the best of economic times, the trade offs of obtaining venture capital are stark.  It makes sense to have an alternative plan to grow a business.  And, this makes even more sense in a time of economic uncertainty, when obtaining venture capital is generally harder.  Whether the market is good or bad, a successful entrepreneur should be ready to grow a business without outside capital, particularly in the earlier stages of development.