Summary

• The question isn’t how to get funding. The question is how do you get enough of the day-to-day necessities so that you can focus on the work you think is most important. 
• Be frugal. 
  • It makes it way easier to fundraise at the beginning because funders have to take less of a risk on you.
  • ​Frugality allows you to feel safe and free. It means that it’s much harder for things to hurt you if there’s a shock to your system. Even if you lost everything, since you don’t need much, it’s easy to get it all back. 
• Where you live is the biggest contributing factor to how much you spend. 
  • Nomad List - find places to live that are affordable. 
  • Live with roommates to lower the costs and improve mental health.
  • How to have cost-effective fun.
• Travel around EA hubs at the beginning and stay at people houses so that you can get more of a sense of the different places. Allows for networking and serendipity, leading to better fundraising, hiring, and ideas. 
• Having a large network helps you avoid the unilateralist’s curse. You can just ask a few people you know what they think of the idea. If a majority think it’s net negative, don’t do it. 
  • Importantly, if only a small percentage think it’s bad, you can still do it, and that’s not the unilateralist’s curse. That is just normal for any EA idea. 
  • Nobody knows the exact percentage when it becomes the unilateralist’s curse. It could be as high as 95% of people thinking it’s net negative, it could be much lower. I generally recommend not doing something if >50% of informed, values aligned people think it’s net negative. 
• Get room covered by one of these services and then you don’t even have to fundraise at the beginning. You can just start working right away and build up a little proof of concept before asking for funding. 
  • EA Hotel - covers room and board
  • EA Houses - covers room
  • Living with your parents to lower costs at the beginning is a great way to jumpstart your org. 
• Potential cheaper places to live
  • Mexico City - incredibly green, vibrant, and affordable, and a good time zone for North America
  • Buenos Aires - cheap, beautiful, and safe
  • Lisbon - incredibly beautiful and good time zone for Europe
  • Thailand and Bali are classic spots and are good if time zones won’t be a problem for you.

If you liked this, you might also like:

• The 80/20 of fundraising
• Fundraising tips
• Apply for coaching. We offer fundraising mentorship, among other topics, such as strategy, hiring, mental health, and others.