How did you fund your start-up business?

News.com: SAN FRANCISCO–Brad Meador’s in luck. The virtual dealer at Eurobetpoker.com has just dealt him a jack and an ace of hearts. A few seconds and clicks of the mouse later, he wins the $62 pot.

Poker–Texas Hold’em, to be precise–is his game, and he nets an average of $100 to $120 an hour at it.

Sitting at his desk in a small, stuffy office in a gritty corner of San Francisco’s South of Market district, Meador is nonchalant about the win. It’s just another Wednesday morning at ClearContext, a software start-up that’s keeping the lights on and the servers running with the aid of its founders’ online poker winnings.

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How’s that for start-up business funding!

I don’t know about you but I’m not confident enough in my gambling skills to depend on it for generating cash to start a business. It might work for these guys and if their business doesn’t make it they have a poker career to fall back on, but for the rest of us we need to find capital in other ways.

I’ve never had a loan, never asked to borrow money from family and never started a project that required significant funding upfront. That’s not to say I won’t in the future, but certainly in my brief business past I’ve preferred to play with ideas before investing much money and then drip feed expansion by investing profits into growth. Using this method you really need to have patience because it takes months and months to get going.

Were possible I always try and do most tasks myself. I’m a true solo entrepreneur and thankfully the Internet has allowed me to operate this way and play with business ideas by simply building a website and telling people about it. I hire contractors when I need a particular skill that is beyond me or not cost effective to learn myself. This however is not always the best way to go about things and I realise that for long term growth I can’t go it alone forever, nor do I want to.

How did you fund your start-up business?