Excerpted from SEAK’s course, “How to Become a Successful Physician Inventor”
Clearly, the first process in the patent is your own money. Your own money is gonna carry you as far as your own money lasts. And that might be a million dollars into it, or that might be, you know, $5,000 into it, or $4,000 into it, and not the rest of it.
The second source of money are the three Fs, the three Fs of financing. And these are family, friend, and fools. And that will carry you a certain way also. These people rarely get stuck. They get promises of how you’ll pay them back and you’ll give them 14 times what they put in, in three weeks or something like that. You can make it as… Depends on how close you are with these friends as to what you wanna promise them. Your family is gonna be there, so you better beware of that. That will only carry you so far. Eventually, if you’re going to try and create a team, build a product, and do things with your patent other than just approach some company to sell it, you’re going to need financing. And financing comes in quite a number of different ways that Steve was discussing. On every list is the word grants. Grants are not really a very good way to initially begin a project. A grant is a difficult application to write. Some of them run hundreds of pages and have to be written in a terse, yet informative style, which is difficult to write if you haven’t written one before.
