By Hari Julka
A lot of people keep complaining about the lack of capital in starting a business or breaking their daily loop of life.
However, they hardly realise that you don’t need much capital to start a business – but what you need is social capital.
The social capital consists of the brand you build, what you stand for, the things you have done for others, and how your business improves the lives of others.
Social capital acts in the same way as financial capital. You have to keep building and storing it.
How you make social capital is through the great insights or valuable data and information you provide to others – which can help them in business, life, career, relationships, business or simply in making more money.
This capital only grows but can also erode if untoward incidents happen towards your brand.
You can build social capital by meeting people outside your workplace. By helping them gain recognition, self worth, love or simpy respect in society.
By helping them in an area you are familiar with, or by helping them connect socially with others, you build social capital.
How social capital can help a startup founder:
- Helps you keep in touch with friends and community for support
- Helps you not lose hope in dire circumstances
- Helps you gain referrals and references for business
- Helps you gain mentorship
- Helps you get projects and ultimately can help you gain angel funding
- Can act as sources of important sources of information
Man is a social animal. A human being’s animal instincts also instantly make him prone to negative bias – for fear of attack or extinction. This negative bias towards incidents also could make him feel negative about other circumstances of not helped by others with positive experiences and optimism.
Without lack of social connections – he or she – can go into a space of negative bias – and could become an anti-social animal – without lack of emotional quotient to deal with others or other human circumstances.
Lack of empathy and lack of a high emotional quotient could make him lose business, lose employments, lose friends or even family. Social capital is thus the basic capital one should focus on earning while building a startup.
A startup is like a baby which needs all the help it can garner to stand, up after many failures. The simple way for digital startups to build social capital is to build online communities.
These communities teach an entrepreneur how to operate in a real world. However anti-social capital can also erode democracies.
Today’s anti-social leaders have developed another online strategy. Build social communities of like minded people. Egg them towards touchy issues and build fear of the other. These anti-social leaders are often totally lacking in real world behaviour, which can be a cause of nemesis for the public and democracies.
However social capital can help build nations and economies.
Conclusion: Startup entrepreneurs should start building social communities of their clients, vendors, employees and support system. This will help them gain advice on how to grow further and not lose way.
About Author
Hari Julka is a digital marketer and blogger based in New Zealand. He loves to blog on topics such as technology, entrepreneurship, social media, and managing teams in the digital world. In the past time, he loves to practice his nature photography skills.
