In this instructional video, Eric Siu explains why entrepreneurs seek external capital and outlines five alternative, fast‑track financing methods beyond the classic venture capital, private equity, and bank loan routes. He first frames the need for funding—hiring, technology acquisition, office space, equipment, or real‑estate costs—and notes that reinvesting customer revenue is often the simplest path. He then contrasts traditional routes (VC series rounds, private equity, bank loans) with five non‑traditional options: (1) JOBS Act‑enabled crowdfunding, covering Regulation D (accredited investors), Regulation CF (open to any investor, low‑minimum contributions), and Regulation A+ (higher caps with audited financials); (2) revenue‑based financing, exemplified by Lighter Capital for SaaS and ClearBank for e‑commerce, where repayment is a percentage of revenue; (3) business lines of credit, with a nod to Credit Suisse as a source; (4) Stripe Capital, a revenue‑linked advance that deducts a small slice of monthly sales; and (5) SBA loans, government‑backed small‑business loans ranging from $100k to $5 million with favorable terms. Siu shares his own experience raising $305k via Regulation D for ClickFlow and reflects on advice to favor Regulation CF for broader investor participation. He concludes with a decision framework: use revenue reinvestment for lifestyle‑oriented businesses, VC for high‑growth “next‑Facebook” ambitions, and SBA or other alternatives for established, moderate‑growth companies. The video ends with a call for comments on missed financing options.
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Today we are going to talk about 5 alternative ways to fund your business fast. But before we do, don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button if you're coming from YouTube, but whatever platform you're coming from, don't forget to subscribe because it helps you grow personally and professionally. First, I want to talk about why would you fund your business in the first place? I mean, you could be looking to build the next Facebook, the next TikTok, and you need to grow very quickly. So you do need funds to grow quickly. Why do you need funds? Because you might need to hire people, you might need to buy or acquire other technologies. You might need to get office space too. There's, you might need to buy equipment as well. So there's a lot of things. And if you're in real estate, you might need to figure out, uh, there's a lot of hard costs associated with that. Depends on the business that you're trying to do, right? If you want to grow faster, if you have an established business model, what I would recommend is if you think you have a formula that you're working towards that is going to work, typically then it's like, okay, let's take out some of, um, let's figure out what type of financing financial instruments we can pull together to make us grow faster, right? If you want to fund your business, why not just fund it through the sales from your customers, right? That's why a lot of people reinvest, which is what I've done really heavily throughout the years. Now, if you're not growing as quickly, there's an issue with that because maybe you shouldn't be funding something that's not growing as quickly, right? You could go down the venture capital route. You go on the roadshow, sometimes you're talking to maybe 20, hundreds of VCs, 300 VCs or so, and you're basically presenting the business model. I recommend checking out the Airbnb financing or fundraising deck. That's a really good one. And you can do that, right? And then at that point you'll be raising, uh, typically it'll be like a Series A. You'd be raising probably north of 7 figures, at least in the United States. You could go down the private equity route too, but typically for private equity they want bigger, more established businesses. So again, just depends on where you're at. What I'm going to talk about, these 5 different alternative ways, these are not the traditional ways, the 3 traditional ways that I just gave you. And yeah, obviously you can go get a bank loan as well, right? But I'm going to talk about different modifications to this that will be helpful to you. If you are in the United States, there is, there was something written called the JOBS Act a couple of years ago. And, um, the JOBS Act basically allows people to fund businesses. Previously you would have to be an accredited investor to invest in a business. You know, you can't just have like someone that's making, I don't know, $20,000 a year put their entire paycheck into a startup because, uh, the thinking behind that was, was that would be irresponsible, right? This is more so around crowdfunding. Think of it like Kickstarter, right? But Kickstarter but kind of on steroids because because you're now investing in actual companies and not just like an idea. So let me drink from this great cup over here. Basically, the JOBS Act was signed and then that opened the door for a lot of companies to raise money more easily. So you have 3 options here. You have Regulation D, which is the first one I'll talk about. Regulation D is actually how we raised money for ClickFlow, which is our software company. We raised about $305,000 so far and we're still, we actually extended out our round till December 31st, 2019. Um, because the interest was very high, right? We decided to go with Reg D because we wanted to have accredited investors. So these are people that are probably top 2% in the United States, people that are making over $200,000 a year, or they have a, uh, you know, net worth of $2 million. So either or of those are fine to be kind of an accredited investor. You know, for us it was more hoops to jump through. Like we had to verify each and every investor, but from our lawyer's perspective, it was safer to do that. Now what I learned from doing the Growth Accelerator Mastermind, that's the group that I do with Neil, we had the co-founder of Activision Blizzard, Howard Marks. Um, I used to play all his games all the time. Howard Marks really enlightened us because he said, look, Eric, you actually did it the way that I prefer you don't do it. Regulation D is, it's very restricting. You should have done Regulation CF, right? So CF like CrossFit or CF like ClickFlow. So Regulation CF is basically you can have anybody. I can have my mom take out her credit card and do a $50 credit card transaction. She can fund the business with $50, right? So I think that's a great mechanism. Imagine this, if you had 1,000 people put in $5, um, guess what? People had— you have $5,000 that, uh, that's invested. But not only that, you have an entire army. You have 1,000 people. These people are now investors in your company and they're very proud of it. They're going to go out there and they're going to do great things for you. Because they're proud to be investors in your company. So think of it that way. It's also a marketing thing too. Regulation A+, I'm not as familiar with, but I do know that with Regulation CF, you can raise up to $1 million per year. With Regulation A+, and again, I'm not a financial expert, you can raise way more money than that. You just need to have kind of verified financials each year. It's a lot more money per year. Number 2 is revenue-based financing. Okay, so you have Lighter Capital, you have ClearBank. ClearBank is more geared towards ecommerce companies. Lighter Capital is more geared towards SaaS companies. The idea here is that they will fund you based on your revenue, right? So it's like you're getting a loan, but you're just basically going to pay back over time. You're going to pay back a percentage of you know revenues, right? This is if you have a proven business model. If you think that you can grow a lot faster and then you have a stable business, like they're down to give you a loan, right? Obviously, so revenue-based financing. This is kind of new. Number three, I would say is you could get a line of credit for your business too. So there are a lot of options out there. I recommend a website. It's called creditsuisse.com. I think it's S U I. S-S-E, creditsuisse.com. Number 4, on the ClickFlow side of things, what we did with Stripe, Stripe has a financing model that I believe it's called Stripe Capital and they will, they will fund you. Um, let's, we basically took $10,000 out from them and, um, they basically will take that $10,000 as a percentage of our revenue each month. So it doesn't completely cripple us. It takes like, like a small, very small percentage of our revenue each month and, um, until it's paid off. Right. And I think that's very fair. And I really liked that model. So kudos to Stripe for doing that because a $10,000 thing can be a game changer, especially in the early days of the business when you're just trying to make things work. The last one I'll leave you with is the SBA loans. This is done in the United States. You probably have a version of this in your country, I would hope. But SBA loans are small business loans. You can actually pull up to, I think, you know, anywhere from like $100 grand or so all the way up to $5 million US dollars. If you knew what you're doing with your business and you have a good business model and you said, Hey, I just need to buy a couple of companies and we're going to fund them using an SBA loan. Great. You can do that. And an SBA loan is actually, you know, the terms are very favorable and, um, you know, the interest rate is not that high, right? Compared to other types of loans. Obviously you can go to the bank and get loans too. I think that's one of the traditional ones that I left out. But yeah, I mean, you have these 5 options and plus I'm sure there's like a bunch of other options out there. I would prefer that if you're building a business that's going to suit your lifestyle, that you just focus on focus on revenue from your clients, right? And then you just grow that way. And if you, if you're just looking to kind of maintain something, if you're looking to go quickly, you want to build the next Facebook, you want to build the next Instagram, the next TikTok, then I think it's, it might be worth looking at VC. Um, if you've got an established business model and you just want to, maybe you're not looking to, you're not in the hundreds of millions or so and private equity really isn't looking at you that much, then you know, you take out an SBA loan and you kind of deploy that way, right? So there's There's a lot of different ways to skin a cat here. So let me know in the comments what you think I might've missed from a, from a financing perspective. Um, and if you think I'm wrong or not, let me know in the comments. And if you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there and whatever platform you're coming from. If you rate, review, and subscribe, I will love you even more than I do right now. And we'll see you tomorrow.
