Ask HN: Have you taken on debt to fund your startup?
So in the past I almost exclusively grew my companies through revenue and borrowed funds, it can be stressful but it also is empowering as you don&#x27;t have investors to please.  A few comments from my point of view.<p>1. Loans are fine just watch the terms.  Almost always you&#x27;ll be signing a personally guarantee on them.  I used credit cards, home equity, business loans etc.  Look to your local small community or regional banks which many times are more willing to work with you.<p>2. IMO avoid SVB&#x27;s products generally, they really aren&#x27;t that favorable to startups.  Your local smaller community banks will usually beat anything SVB will offer.  In the US it is also worth pursuing government backed loans (SBA) etc.<p>3. Take advantage of SCORE, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.score.org&#x2F;resource&#x2F;list-startup-resources" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.score.org&#x2F;resource&#x2F;list-startup-resources</a>.  Score has mentoring and other services which can help you in non-monetary ways which can be super helpful.  Not saying they are perfect, but a lot of retired execs volunteer services there and have networks they can help you explore.<p>4. Factoring: I did work for a couple of Factoring companies, in general I advise people to avoid factoring companies at all costs.  It is IMO the most expensive type of money you can get legally, it isn&#x27;t rare to lose 30% on factoring, e.g. they &quot;buy&quot; your invoices at 70% of face value, sometimes less depending on your market and size.  You can get better deals sometimes, but generally they are taking a pretty decent risk so you&#x27;ll pay for it in some terms.  I&#x27;ve seen promises from factoring companies that they only take 10%, but then they charge management and collection fees which people don&#x27;t realize makes it still roughly a 30% take, or more.  Many times you can get an existing investor to do this at much better terms then a factoring company.<p>5. Last thing, if you have $5 or $10k and want to start developing corporate credit that isn&#x27;t personally guaranteed it isn&#x27;t that hard to do.  Again, go to the smaller banks, talk to them and open a 6-12 month CD (or other product they recommend), and then ask for a loan against that product (e.g. use it as collateral).  Some times they will only loan 50%-70% of it initially, but that changes pretty quick.  Use the loan, pay it off early, rinse and repeat.  As you do this they will start upping the limit and letting you borrow more then the value of the collateral, until at some point you&#x27;ll qualify for standard loan products.  This isn&#x27;t an immediate fix, but it builds corporate credit and over 1-2 years you can have a nice revolving line to pull from.  Last time I did this, we took $2k and after 2 years had a $100k revolving line we could utilize that was not personally guaranteed.  This can be difficult to do with the large banks as it doesn&#x27;t fit their standard products, but smaller regional or community banks usually are far more flexible and happy to help.