The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers' Cash

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VCs, business angels, incubators and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they've delivered to their investors and the astonishingly large companies that their ecosystem has created.

But the vast majority of fast-growing...