Return-to-Office Mandates Are Bringing More Sick Workers to the Water Cooler

Apple's Super Bowl Marketing Playbook Is a Lesson in Keeping Customers Captivated

Target Looks at Launching a Paid Membership Program

Elon Musk's $56 Billion Pay Package Might Have You Wondering: How Much Should You Pay Yourself?

Sam Altman Is Attempting to Raise Trillions to Supercharge AI Chipmaking

How Beyoncé Soft-Launched a Mysterious Beauty Brand

How Google Is Helping HSBC Reach $1 Billion in Climate Tech Investment

It is very, very, very difficult to raise venture capital investment for your startup. Especially right now. In fact, one of my investor friends just told Axios that this is the worst startup investment environment he's seen since the Great Recession.

Woof. I'm guessing that like 90 percent of you don't remember that period. It was no fun.

Fine. That's OK. As a career entrepreneur, I wear the customer-first badge. Proudly. I strongly believe raising money through customer sales is the best option, and in a lot of cases, it should be the only option.

I don't want to have to ignore a great startup idea because a handful of West Coast venture capitalists won't deem it investable. I also believe that the vast majority of startup ideas aren't VC-investable in the first place, at least not initially. They could eventually turn out to be a massive success -- they just shouldn't try to buy that success with VC money out of the gate.

Now, that's not to say I don't believe in the VC model. Far from it. I've been down the VC-funded road half a dozen times, and to be honest with you, it's been a totally different ride each time.

For example, Automated Insights could not have done what we did -- using early Natural Language Generation and generative AI to write stories that humans could or would not write--without a capital infusion. But we were careful to raise and deploy that capital the right way.

We were also very lucky because while it's certainly no longer impossible for an early-stage startup to raise VC money outside of the Valley, it's still highly improbable. And even when it happens, it usually happens to startups that already have customers, revenue, and solid leadership in place -- all of the things that make VC unnecessary.

So I am, by both necessity and choice, customer-first. And you should be too.

But as it is with a lot of entrepreneurial advice and punditry, everyone says you should be a customer-first company...but no one actually tells you how to build a customer-first company.

So here are the three ways I did it.

This is the most direct route to customer revenue, but it's also the one that requires the most........

© Inc.com