How can I acquire funding to take my tech product idea to the next level?

My guess is that the question you are asking is, how to get funds? In which case, I think you could try:

1. Asking friends, family and friends of friends and family of family. See if anyone is interested and see if you can create a group of people who like your idea and can help you move it into a prototype stage.

2. Save whatever money you can and depending what your product is, see if you can outsource the development through freelancer.com.

3. Set your project up on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Or any equivalent crowdfunding site.

4. See if there are any local government/state schemes that offer funds for projects such as the one you have in mind.

5. Take out a bank loan or credit card. Not recommended. My guess is that you are still looking to validate your idea first. Plus, you can likely achieve what you need to without credit from the bank.

6. Find investors. Or perhaps consider a platform like seedrs.com. Go to local chamber of commerce events, start building your network.

7. Send out a message to all your LinkedIn contacts, tell them about your idea and ask them if they can help or notify you of anyone they think might be interested in your idea.

8. Go on Product Hunt, see if you can find an idea similar to yours and start researching how those companies got their investments.

9. Run your idea past a local university and see if it fits in with any of their current projects. Perhaps there will be some crossover.

10. Put out a call on all your social networks, email etc and note you're looking for support and funds for your prototype. Worth a shot.

Hi Paris,
Congratulations on taking the first step!

I've worked in both consumer and enterprise startups in Silicon Valley the past 5 years and advised about 40 companies.

If I were you, I'd give this book a read:
http://theleanstartup.com/book

and then move onto:
https://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/

The biggest mistakes I see people with ideas looking to launch a company make are:
1) Not talking to customers early enough to solicit feedback
2) Worrying too much that someone will steal your idea
3) Not realizing that the idea is 1% and execution is 99%
4) Not starting small and building out from there. Build traction, build a story, and keep perfecting it.
5) And keep talking to your customers/users :)

Hope that's helpful. Feel free to schedule a call if you'd like to talk more.
Brian

Hi Paris,

Congrats on taking the first step by coming here to ask this question.

Try to get funds from family and friends. Build a MVP, test it and check it your hypothesis is right. If it is, then you can do more research to get funding from an Angel investor in France or in the EU.

You can check http://www.kimaventures.com/

They do seed investing in Europe but build the MVP first. An idea is not as valuable as a tested idea.