You may have the greatest idea for a product or startup in the world, but ultimately, without money, it is going to be difficult to make your idea grow and reach new audiences. One of the best ways to fast track the growth of your business is to seek seed funding from an investor. Below we look at how to get seed funding as a startup.

What is seed funding?

Seed funding is an initial form of investment made into a company purely to get it to grow to a self-sustainable level, or until it is ready for a larger round of investment. Seed funding is typically the second stage of investment, after start-up funding, which usually involves small amounts of money from family and friends. Seed funding, on the other hand, is done through angel investors, and they will typically take equity in return for offering investment.

Although it would be nice to maintain full control of your startup, this is not always practical, and seed funding offers a great alternative for keeping your business alive and up with the competition.

Should I raise seed funding?

Despite the above point, not every startup will need seed funding. Before you take this route, carefully consider whether you need seed funding or not. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most successful investment platforms, says “don’t raise money unless you want it, and it wants you.”

What this means is that if you’re going to be successful in pitching for investment, you have to show the investors that you want it enough and that your business wants it to. Investment is best for businesses that are fast-growing or are planning to grow fast with the investment, so if you fall into neither category, then seed funding is not for you.

How much seed funding should I raise?

Generally, “as much as you can” is the most common answer that you will find to this question, but remember that bigger does not necessarily mean better. Extra money can, more often than not, mean extra pressure, such as more due diligence, more control being passed over to the investors, and more questions that need to be answered about where the money is going.

But, the more money that you receive, the more likely it is that you can get your startup to a profitable point at which you may not need investment again in the future. As with the last point of considering whether investment is right for your business, carefully consider how much seed funding you need as well.

When you pitch to investors to get seed funding, you want to show them exactly why you want the amount that you do, and show them exactly what impact this will have on your startup. You need to convince the investors that they should be parting with their money for your startup. For this, consider what your burn rate is and what your milestones and goals will be, as investors are likely to ask you these questions.

Sourcing seed funding for your startup

Once you have carefully considered both why you want investment and what you will do with it, you can carefully craft your pitch to deliver to investors. There are hundreds of investors, funding platforms and crowdfunding campaigns available for you to source the necessary seed funding for your startup.

You could use crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter or accelerators such as Y Combinator, as mentioned earlier. Each of the different types of platforms offer its own unique benefits, targets and levels of investment, and you need to find the one that best reflects your startup interests, goals and funding required. Resources such as this are a great place to start to see the different platforms available to you.

Also, considering reading guides such as A Guide to Seed Fundraising for further detailed information on the process. Seed funding, while a big commitment, can help scale and grow your startup immensely to help it reach new heights. Carefully think about where you want your business to go over the next few years, and from there you can decide just how and why you want to seek seed funding.

If you fully believe that you both need and want seed funding, then this will come across in any pitch that you make to investors, securing you that much-needed investment.

If you are an online business, then fast internet and loading speeds are the absolute bedrock for the stability and profitability of your company. While the digital world is getting bigger and better, and we can use our browsers now for almost anything, this increase in the scope of the internet can lead to slow loading, lagging or even crashing. Below we explore how you can speed up your load times without needing to spend money on faster broadband speeds.

Update your browser

Google Chrome is the most used browser on the internet (having recently overtaken Internet Explorer), but pretty much all browsers work the same way with similar features. One of the first things that you can do to speed up your browser is check for any updates; your browser will not always update automatically, so this step often gets overlooked.

Not updating your browser could mean that you are running on an older, slower version, or one that is having bug issues. To find out if your browser has been updated, simply type in “update [name of your browser]” into the browser you use and follow the steps provided.

Disable any toolbars, extensions or plugins

Toolbars, extensions, and plugins are like add-ons or apps for your browser, and some have many useful functions and purposes. However, it may be that you have accidentally installed some that you do not need, or that you no longer use, and deleting or disabling these can help to speed up your browser.

You can usually view your toolbars, extensions and plugins from the settings menu in your browser of choice.

Clear history, cache, and cookies

Another useful way to speed up your internet browsing is to clear your history, cache, and cookies.

Cache: your internet cache is locally stored image and content files from websites that you have visited. This is useful as the next time you visit that webpage, the content and files will load quickly. However, as your cache builds, it will take longer for websites to source through your growing stock of locally stored content.

Cookies: cookies are also locally saved files, but on you as the user, such as usernames and passwords.

History: this is your browsing history, keeping a record of every site you have visited.

Clearing these three saved pieces of data and information can help your browser to run faster. However, it can also cause inconveniences, such as with you having to enter your user name and password again.

Sit nearer the router

This one is not always practical for everyone, but the further away you are from your internet router, the slower your internet is going to be, especially if the signal has to travel through solid objects like walls. If possible, consider moving closer to the router.

Use minimal tabs

There will be points while you are working that you need several tabs open, and modern browsers are designed to support this. However, the more tabs you have open, the slower your browser will be, especially if each page is rich in content, audio or visual files.

If possible, aim to have the absolute minimal number of tabs open; perhaps by working your way through each tab individually and closing it once you are done with it.

Extensions

Although we talked earlier about disabling any unnecessary or un-used extensions and plugins, there are some useful add-ons available that can help with the speed of your browser. Extensions such as Google’s Data Saver work by running some internet traffic through Google’s servers, thereby reducing the downloads per page and helping to speed up slower pages.

Turning off prefetching and automatic loading

Modern browsers attempt to predict where you will head next on your webpages, and while this can be extremely useful, it can also slow down your browser, especially if it gets its predictions wrong!

We’d only recommend this for really slow browsers, and if you feel that yours is one of these, simply type “turn off prefetching in [name of your browser]” into your search engine and follow the steps that are listed.

Minimise the other tasks that you are doing

If you have multiple documents, applications, and e-mails open on your desktop, regardless of whether it is on a browser or not, it is going to slow down the processing speeds of your computer, and therefore, your internet. Keep your computer running as little tasks as possible, so that when you need to use the internet, it can run at full power.

Last week UK interest rates felt the first cut since 2009, undergoing a transition from 0.5% to 0.25%. The decision was approved by all nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

This record low Bank rate (the interest charged when the central bank lends to the commercial bank) should reduce payments on loans and encourage households and businesses to spend more. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England has said that banks have “no excuse not to pass on the lower borrowing costs to customers and will be charged a penalty if they fail to do so”.

The news of these cuts should not only provide some encouragement to aspiring entrepreneurs and small businesses to borrow more loans, invest and expand,  but also mark a period of higher consumer spending.

Take, for example, the impact on mortgage repayments. A mortgage is by far the biggest debt taken on by the vast majority of households in the UK. Roughly 11.1 million households have one. Due to interest rates cuts, the average monthly mortgage bill is reduced, freeing up some extra cash for those households to spend on goods and services. According to the Office for National Statistics house price data, a cut to 0.25% means a £22 monthly reduction in the bill for the averaged priced home of £211,000 (if they are on a variable 25-year repayment mortgage).

Add to this factors such as easier access to cheap credit, it’s likely that consumer spending will increase in the coming months. Making this a great time to test out new products, expand store holdings and push some advertising.

The Bank of England has also signalled that the rates may go lower to deal with the economic damages resulting from Brexit. In fact, according to the Bank of England’s deputy governor Ben Broadbent, there is a real prospect of a further cut in the rates before the end of this year.  Reports have stated that a majority of the MPC backed another cut.

The United Kingdom has the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2015 our total GDP was 2.849 trillion dollars. We are the ninth largest exporter in the world and the fifth largest importer.  For four consecutive years the UK has been the fastest growing economy in the G7.

How do startups contribute to this success? Here are 5 ways that startups and SMEs are important to the UK economy.

Employment and Job Creation

The greatest impact that SMEs have on the UK economy is the size and scale of the jobs they provide.

According to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS), in 2015 SMEs provided 15.6 million jobs, 60% of all total private sector employment.

In the next three years, it has been predicted that SMEs provide extra 250,000 new jobs.

Mark Heart, a professor at Aston University and expert in the areas of entrepreneurship, enterprise and small business asserts the employment of SMEs when saying,  ‘Small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years… particularly through the recession.’

Income and profits

Along with creating jobs, UK SMEs generate a significant proportion of the UKs annual turnover. According to the DBIS, UK SMEs provide a combined annual turnover of £1.8 trillion, that’s 47% of all private sector turnovers in the UK.

Share of business

SME’s also comprise the vast majority of the compositional make-up of UK business in the economy.

In 2015 there were a record 5.4 million private sector businesses, an increase of 146,000 since 2000. Of these, 99.9% are small to medium-sized enterprises, and 99.3% are small businesses.

Adding to this, 45% of SMEs plan to grow in the next 12 months and all SMEs, excluding those with 0 employees, improved growth prospects in 2013 and 2014.

Appetite for growth is strong and increasing among SMEs.

The balance of payments

The balance of payments (BOPs) is a crucial feature to the UK economy. In its simplest form, the BOPs tell us how much is being spent by consumers and firms on imported goods and services, and how successful firms have been in exporting to other countries.

An independent study, commissioned by Exact, revealed that 54% of SMEs sell products or services abroad, with the manufacturing sector very much leading that charge with 68% of them exporting.

Adding to this we may see a further rise in SME exports. Chancellor George Osborne has placed a target to get 100,000 more British businesses exporting by 2020.

Playing a leading role in women’s representation

At the end of 2015, less than 10% of executive directors at FTSE 100 companies were women. However, at the end of 2014 around 18% of all UK SMEs were female-led.

There are now almost 1.5 million women self-employed which represents an increase of around 300,000 since before the economic downturn. This is due to the fact women are increasingly starting up businesses.  Between 2008 and 2011 women accounted for an unprecedented 80% of the newly self-employed.

These female led SMEs contributed are invaluable to the UK economy and generate around £50 billion to the UK economy between 2006-2010.