5 reasons you should self-fund your startup (from a team that actually did it)
Over the past two years, Launchpeer has gone from being $30K in debt to earning $100K+ in monthly revenue. We’ve grown our team to 22 (kickass) people, practically outgrown our office, and built entirely new segments of our business. And we’ve done it all without taking any outside investment.
In this era of startup hype and unicorn exits, it’s easy to forget that less than 1% of startups get funded. You read that right: less than one percent.
Raising venture capital isn’t impossible — mix a solid idea, solid metrics, and the right amount of hustle, and you could be on your way to a seed round or even a Series A. We talk to a ton of early-stage entrepreneurs who have made outside funding a key part of their business plan.
But the thing is…we think that’s a huge mistake. Fundraising is extremely challenging and time consuming, taking energy and effort away from actually building your company. And the challenges don’t necessarily stop once you’ve snagged the cash.

Here are five reasons why we made it a point to self-fund Launchpeer, and how it’s paid off in the end:
- Self-funding allows you to retain 100% of your company. All of the decisions about your business, from your growth strategy, to who you include on your team, are yours and your co-founders’. At Launchpeer, we don’t have to hold monthly or quarterly board meetings or prepare reports for someone who’s barely involved in the day-to-day to review and approve. We are accountable to our clients, ourselves, and our teammates. And we enjoy that. We aren’t just working towards some crazy big exit — we’re working to do good work with good people.
- Self-funding actually teaches you to be MORE innovative. When you don’t have an endless budget to carry you down the traditional path to success, you have to think creatively. You might even need to get a little scrappy. You figure out newer, faster, cheaper ways to do things. If you can’t find a cheaper way, you roll up your sleeves and teach yourself how to get stuff done (half of our team essentially taught themselves how to code, do graphic design, or get press coverage). You look at problems from different angles because if you don’t figure out a solution, you might have to close your doors. This mindset stays with you, too. Our team is constantly thinking creatively and hacking away at new solutions and ideas even today.
- Self-funding lights a fire under your ass. Along those same lines, when you are self-funded you are also incredibly self-sufficient. You don’t have venture capital to go out and hire a big team or bring in expert consultants. That means you wear a lot of hats. When we first started, our co-founders did everything from software development to accounting to sales. We went to networking events several nights a week to meet potential clients and mentors, we worked side jobs, and did what we had to do to make ends meet. That hustle paid off, though. Now our co-founders are speaking at conferences and we have enough clients to hire 2–3 new employees per quarter.
- Self-funding allows you to grow at your own rate. When you’re not accountable to someone else’s balance sheet, you leave yourself room to test and improve over time. Sure, everyone talks about hockey stick growth, but running a startup is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t have to hit unattainable targets set by VCs. Instead, you can focus on specific elements of your business, run tests, conduct surveys, find out what works and what doesn’t, and iterate. If we try something and it doesn’t work, we stop doing it, come up with something new, and try that instead. No one’s there to tell us we have to grow in a certain way and by a certain time.
- Self-funding means you and your team become truly invested in your company and its success. Of course, when you’re working together to make your own ideas come to life, you’re automatically going to feel more invested in what you do day-to-day. But when your work is backed by your own money (and sweat equity), it means even more. As we’ve built our team, we’ve hired entrepreneurial people who care deeply about contributing to the growth of Launchpeer and the startups we work with. They know we started from scratch and they’re proud to be part of that.
By the way, when we say “self-funded,” we don’t mean we had some huge influx of cash from friends & family or that we’re independently wealthy. Quite the contrary. We started Launchpeer with a few thousand dollars in savings (as in, $3–4K) and hustled our asses off to sell our services until we had enough of a client base to keep us afloat.
Are you self-funding your startup? Want more advice about how to do it? Click here to chat with someone on our team!
