After successfully going through your new Hong Kong company incorporation, as a startup owner and founder, you must be into a stage of running your business with your co-founding members. There are going to be product development, market research, new user acquisition, marketing, and more for your entire team to take care of. One other aspect that you must eventually face is funding your company. You and your co-founding members will be powerless to keep up with the funding of your business for the next couple of years, if you have aimed to scale and grow your business into much bigger than what it was initially.
To fund your company while your product has gone into the alpha or beta stages of development, you may approach some of the incubators and accelerators locally in HK or overseas. These incubators and accelerator would mostly be the ones who have focus on different areas (or industries) including travel, eating/dining, fashion/lifestyle, beauty, parenting, technologies (or digital tech), finance, artificial intelligence, and more. The incubators don’t only provide startup entrepreneurs with the required funding, but they would also offer great mentorship and a support network.
You and your team may work from home, or from one of the co-working space offices in Hong Kong, Kowloon, or New Territories. The co-working spaces are great places to meet with other entrepreneurs of similar minds, and grow your people’s network. Imagine you may meet someone new who may later be able to introduce you to other people (i.e. investors) in companies who may be interested in putting funds in your startup. The co-working spaces may host offline events from time to time. For some co-working spaces, they host events that go on year-round in their different office spaces in HK.
The Hong Kong government has been committed to help strengthening and growing those innovative startups with future potential in advancing technologies for the local HK communities. There have always been a number of resources (or funding schemes) available (from the different HK government departments) to support startups and small businesses (i.e. SMEs) in terms of funding. Some departments provide easier opportunities for HK startup entrepreneurs to meet with potential angel investors to invest in startups n/a.
Crowdfunding is another way to raise money/fund for your startup business. Crowdfunding refers to raising capital (i.e. money) through contributions. The fund contribution could be made by small or large, a vast number of people, online platforms, or social media sites. With Crowdfunding, it lets you to raise your required fund from a relatively larger pool. One of the major benefits is that it gives you a great opportunity to test and validate your business or product. You even can get honest feedback from potential users/customers. This gives you the opportunities to readjust your product for the market you are aiming for. Crowdfunding does not restrict you getting fund from only Hong Kong local based investors.
