PM Network - March 2015

additional US$650,000 in venture-capital investment last August, and the following month his company started shipping its product.

Gramovox is no longer a ;edgling startup, but there are project management strategies to be gleaned from the way Mr. Bapu developed his product despite a de;cit of cash. ;ese ;ve strategies are relevant to startups and not-for-pro;ts— and any other resource-strapped organization looking to execute high-stakes projects with a small team and budget.

1) Leverage passion for the project.

What Mr. Bapu lacked in funding at the outset of his project, he made up for by cultivating passionate stakeholders. He generated end-user interest in the project by producing a teaser website showing o; the initial prototype. ;e site was promoted by popular technology news websites, and soon Mr. Bapu had collected thousands of email addresses of interested prospective customers.

;at list helped give him leverage with prospective vendors and contractors. Some agreed to work for reduced or delayed pay. Mr. Bapu estimates that by the time he received money from the crowdfunding campaign, his partners had kicked in more than US$200,000 of unpaid labor. ;is included both donated time and delayed pay.

Not every prospective partner o;ered discounts or ;exible terms, but Mr. Bapu kept calling until he found those who would—including acousticians who tested the horns in anechoic chambers, prototyping shops that produced the horns, and manufacturers who would produce components for the ;n-ished product.

“I found people who really believed in the product, and who also believed in what it could do for them down the road,” Mr. Bapu says. “When you’re starting out in the prototyping process, it’s very easy to drain all your money very