Securing Startup Funding: Advice from Seasoned Entrepreneurs

My advice to first-time entrepreneurs is counter-intuitive: stop trying to secure funding immediately. The glamorized narrative that the “raise” is the victory is wrong. The victory is a sustainable business, and raising capital too early is often detrimental to that goal. I specifically advise founders to wait until their product is public before pitching. I didn’t pitch until we were live. Why? Because early-stage funding terms are historically unfavorable for first-time founders who have nothing but a slide deck. Investors price in the execution risk, which crushes your valuation. With today’s tools, solopreneurs and small teams need far less capital to build a functioning product. Use that leverage to build value before you dilute your ownership.

When you are ready, look beyond traditional VC. In the US, Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) and Reg A+ are excellent but underutilized paths — think Kickstarter, but people invest in your company rather than pre-buying a product. Reg CF quickly accumulates investors willing to back your vision with real money, which tests market reception in a way pitch meetings never can. Some small and mid-size VCs actively browse Reg CF portals for deal flow, so a successful campaign signals you’re de-risked.

For my own path, I avoided VCs and started with familiar angel investors who trusted the person, not just projections. My early mistake was blindly seeking money before I was certain the project had real potential. When you pitch with uncertainty, you invite skepticism — this leads to poor valuations and makes everything harder than it needs to be. The most critical lesson I learned: raise enough capital in a single round. Multiple small rounds distract you from operations, pile up legal fees, and trap you in perpetual fundraising. Calculate what you need to reach a meaningful milestone, add a buffer, and raise that full amount. It is better to endure one difficult fundraising period than to be in a perpetual state of “passing the hat” while trying to run a company.

The most important advice I would give first-time entrepreneurs is to stop treating traditional venture capital as the default measure of legitimacy. Capital should come from alignment, not approval from people who may have never built a company or lived the problem you are solving. The strongest funding sources are those who understand the issue firsthand and care deeply about the outcome. When founders chase gatekeepers, especially women founders, fundraising becomes a performance. When founders build conviction with the right community, fundraising becomes a partnership. Funding is not about being chosen. It is about building something meaningful enough that people willingly stand behind it with both capital and conviction.

I explored traditional venture routes but quickly chose a different path. Instead of raising solely from institutional investors, I opened an invitation-only round to the community Marble Collective is built to serve. We closed our first round during the year’s slowest fundraising period, fifty percent oversubscribed, funded entirely by 75 women leaders who are also our customers. Many were making their first private market investment. By being transparent about who had invested, momentum built organically. The lesson applies far beyond my company. Aligned capital moves faster, brings strategic value beyond money, and creates real momentum. When customers become investors, they do more than fund a company. They validate the model and help build its future.

If I had to give one piece of advice to first-time entrepreneurs about securing funding, it would be this: don’t wait too long. Early funding is often essential for validating your idea quickly, running real experiments, and proving whether the business can scale. Speed matters, and outside capital helps you learn faster.

In our case, we bootstrapped until we passed over $1 million in run-rate revenue. I invested all my personal savings and even borrowed from banks just to keep the company moving. But looking back, we should have raised earlier. Once we realized we had product-market fit, it became clear that outside capital was needed to accelerate growth, so we raised $3 million to scale.

The biggest lesson I learned is how hard it is to convince someone to give you money. Fundraising forces you to grow up fast as a company: we reshaped our entire internal structure based on investor requests, started tracking metrics we previously ignored, and built dashboards that gave us real clarity. It was painful at first, but it made us dramatically more efficient and disciplined.

So my advice is: start talking to investors early — not just when you urgently need capital. Use those conversations to validate your idea, refine your model, spot blind spots, and understand what the market expects from you. Fundraising itself is an education. You’ll still make your own mistakes and learn the hard way, but the earlier you go through that learning curve, the better positioned you’ll be when real growth begins.

Learn how to survive without funding before you learn how to raise it. I built multiple brands while living lean, reinvesting revenue, and saying no to flashy valuations that came with strings attached. I explored angel investors, partnerships, and even asset-backed ideas, but the real education came from reading term sheets and realizing how much control founders casually give away. The funding process teaches you less about money and more about power. Miss that lesson, and you pay for it later. Usually in stress, dilution, and regret.

The single most important thing I learned is that you should never think in terms of startup valuations, or what some investor might pay for a certain percentage of your company. You might think that was obvious. But today, in particular, starting founders get swept up in that sort of thing, because these big headline rounds are the result of capital entering the ecosystem, rather than any measurable performance of the company. The first few times we scaled, there was this constant temptation to “raise a big round.” What actually worked was showing that customers would pay. Get cash flowing, then recycle that cash into more growth. What I see working all the time is founders who are focused on what I call core metrics, like revenue and retention, rather than what I call surface metrics, like pitching themselves as a Series A or a “potential unicorn.” These founders end up with healthier companies, and are less regretful about giving away stock.

So how do you use this idea? Well, instead of measuring your company’s value by hypothetical checks investors might write, why not measure by the real-world dollars customers give you? We do our clients’ fundraising, and fundraising for ourselves, using factoring platforms like Pipe. Pipe lets companies raise cash against customer contracts, for example, in a SaaS model where the customer pays monthly; the company can get total contract value up front; then they can immediately reinvest that cash into hiring or marketing. Pipe gave us a six-figure growth fund in days with zero dilution. This is a powerful tool.

If you want to be a control freak and cash cheap, start as a service to your dream SaaS customers, even if your dream is to end up selling software. Back in the early days we funded salaries by building websites and campaigns for paying clients. Then our greedy founders would take that money and build SaaS stuff with it. That way we not only got paid, but we got beat-up-by-customer feedback on new SaaS stuff, which was way better than any kind of board meeting. I see founders build $1-2M service businesses in less than a year while developing their product in parallel with zero outside investors. The revenue pays the bills. The growth is real.

My biggest piece of advice to first-time entrepreneurs is to think 5 steps ahead of the game — a proactive approach to your operational and growth financial strategy. Funding can be a bit of a rollercoaster, so understanding your financial needs from the start is the foundation of good financial health as a business owner. It’s about positioning your business to be sustainable and adaptable in the long term.

Investors and lenders need to see that you’re proactive with your finances. You need a plan in place, backed by solid financial data and forecasting — not a reactive answer to issues that could arise. That was a big reason we invested in automated systems like Xero early on, which has been an absolute game-changer for us. It gives us real-time insights into our cash flow and profit margins, which not only helps with securing funding but also with making smart, long-term decisions. Implementing automated systems into our way of work allows us to center our decisions on the bigger picture — that way they’re conceptualized as more long-term strategies, rather than responses to financial events as they arise.

Your financial strategy needs to be clear and data-driven. Investors and lenders want to know that you’ve considered potential risks and have the foresight to handle them. The better prepared you are, the more confidence they’ll have in your business. And, as you move forward, always make sure to revisit and refine your approach. Funding is often a marathon, not a sprint, so staying flexible is key.

Learn to walk before you can run.

That’s the best advice I ever got about funding, and it completely shaped how we built our business. The first step to securing funding isn’t perfecting your pitch deck or networking with investors — it’s proving your hypothesis actually works.

Before chasing outside capital, demonstrate that your business fundamentals are solid. Can you turn a dollar into more than a dollar? If you can’t show that basic math, no pitch deck in the world will save you.

Here’s what surprised me: you can get much further on your own money than you think. My co-founder and I each put in around $50,000 and set clear milestones — 90 days, 180 days — to prove our model worked. We wanted to see how far we could stretch before asking anyone else for a dollar. Turns out, we didn’t need to ask at all. We’ve built an eight-figure business without taking on any external investment or bank debt.

The funding options we explored:

We looked at three main routes: non-equity funding (bank loans and overdrafts), venture capital for early-stage, and private equity for later-stage growth. We also considered friends and family — people who trust you are often a safer bet when amounts are modest.

Three lessons from the process:

1. Be a storyteller. It’s not about how sexy your tech is. It’s about giving investors FOMO — making them feel like backing you means being part of something extraordinary.

2. Have bulletproof financials. Know your numbers cold and be able to back them up.

3. Know exactly where the money goes. Marketing? Tech? People? If you’re vague about deployment, investors will lose interest fast.

4. Make sure you’ve got all those metrics investors love — customer acquisition cost, return on capital employed, strong P&L forecasts. Have them ready before you walk into the room.

As an update to our entrepreneurial journey, we are in the process of raising our very first investment round and have various investors interested. The previous advice is based on our experience thus far putting together the documentation that has landed us at this point where we are about to make that big jump with one probable investor.

My biggest advice to first-time entrepreneurs looking for funding is to get your unit economics solid before you talk to anyone.

Investors will always have opinions, but nothing cuts through faster than showing that your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is lower than your margin. When that equation works, you’re not pitching a dream; you’re showing a machine that can scale.

In our journey, we did deal with investor pressure at one point, and I learned a hard lesson: don’t let funding excitement push you into expanding too early. We explored growth capital to move into new markets before we had fully maximized Panama, and it stretched us thin. That experience taught me that runway doesn’t matter if you’re deploying it in the wrong direction.

What I took from the funding process is this:

1. Investors care about clarity and discipline more than big plans.

2. If you can show real data, a repeatable growth loop, and the ability to say “no” to distractions, you’re in a much stronger position.

So before thinking about funding sources, make sure your model actually works. Money amplifies whatever you already have, good or bad.

First time securing funding can be challenging, but the best one to start with are friends and family. And as one grows and succeeds, the funding becomes easier and easier. I personally have always preferred funding through institutions without going to investors, since dilution is bare minimum.

And at least for our brand, which is into patented water filtration products, we found funding through online lenders like wayflyer and youlend much easier than raising and diluting stakes. Once they connect to your store and other bank data, they provide offers within 24-48 hrs. It was really helpful for our growth. Though it can be expensive vis a vis traditional bank, but they are faster and they understand new age ecom business.

This is for tech entrepreneurs, and doesn’t necessarily apply to finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and a vast number of other business types.

Most first-time entrepreneurs fail. Most entrepreneurs who have launched 10 businesses don’t fail. If it’s your first endeavor, bootstrap it, because it’s probably going to fail. A good, easy way to get going is to buy a tiny business to start. There are businesses that are on sale for 10k that are generating revenue, even if it’s just a small amount. Get started with something like that and learn how to run an operating business if you’ve never run one before first. After you’ve got some experience, then start with a friends and family round on a safe note.