How and When to Raise Funds For Your Company

Funding your company is an important part of your startup and expansion strategy. It's a broad topic that has a lot of aspects including: keeping your idea secret, seed funding, angels, venture capitalists or boot-strapping.

Each company is unique and so is the funding strategy. The common thread among all startups is they do need capital and obtaining that capital takes a lot of effort and focus -- something most technical founders hate to spend time on.

There are several great questions and answer related to How to Raise Money. They include:

• Funding: Where to Start? : We get this question a lot and this thread has several great answers. The main take-a-way is to answer the question Do you really need funding?
• Bootstrapping Your Startup : This whole thread is chalked full of great advice. The one take-a-way is that managing your cash flow is vital.
• What to Disclose to Investors : Shares an experience with giving some investor pitches and how much information is too much.
• Angel Investors and Debt : Quite a good post on the difference between debt and equity for an angel round.

Along with how to raise money, we often get the question When to Raise Money. This can be tricky and obviously highly dependent on what business you are in and your burn rate.

Several questions deal with this topic that are worth looking at. They include:

• I don't Think I Need Funding, Should I Look Anyway : Raises a great question and the answers reflect some hard choices startups need to make.
• Can a Startup With Little Expenses Benefit From Investors? : Explores why an investor may be good for you even if you are breaking even or have a low burn rate.
• Savings, Bootstrapping, Startup : Discusses the savings required for a bootstrapped startup. A good rule of thumb was a year's salary but it was also discussed when to go get funding.
• Surviving Without a Paycheck : Startups typically don't make money on day one. That's the primary reason to raise money -- so you can survive and not have to dip into savings.

If your questions fall out of these answers, then feel free to post a question. If you do pose a question, please link to this answer so we can build a better canon for the site.

"keeping your idea secret" to be honest. This is one of the worst things you can do for your business. I promise you that noone, NOone will copy your idea no matter how brilliant it is until it has validation in the open market. Then everyone will copy it :). People are too consumed with their own ideas and projects to even consider copying yours. The best thing you can do is too tell everyone and everybody what your idea is before you invest a lot of time with it. It will only give you validation and insight among a diverse group of people. Your eventual audience.