How to Fund Your Business Without Investors: 3 Options

Jill James
September 10, 2026

Being self-funded doesn’t mean avoiding all outside money — it means funding a business without investors who take ownership or control. If a lender is repaid with interest but has no equity stake, using that money still keeps a business 100% self-funded.

3 ways to fund your self-funded business

Some of you are already tempted to stop reading. Today, I’m going to talk about things you could do to self-fund your business. Not required, just options.

The primary way to grow a self-funded business is through sales. But there are other ways to find growth capital without giving up ownership of your business. Using these methods doesn’t take away that you built it yourself, or that you can say this is 100% yours. All of these are self-funded financing and revenue streams, but beyond what you might have considered.

All being “self-funded” means is that you don’t have investors whose money gives them a portion of ownership and/or a right to control what you do with the company. For example, if I loan you money and you pay me back with interest, I do not own your company. As long as you pay the money back, it’s just money.

So today, I’m going to tell you about three ways to use other people’s money while keeping your business yours.

1. Loans and lines of credit

The most obvious option is borrowing money, and this comes in two flavors:

A line of credit gives you access to a pool of money from a lender for a certain period of time. You take some out when you need it, put it back, take it again, and put it back. You pay interest as you borrow.
A loan is more structured. You get the money up front and agree to pay it back, with interest, over a certain amount of time.

I’ve talked before about good debt and bad debt. This is where that distinction becomes important.

There are moments in a growing business where you need the money before you can make the money. Maybe Big Box Inc wants 10,000 units of your product by a certain date. Great! You have the order. You know how to make the product. You also have to pay your manufacturer before Big Box Inc starts paying you.

That is exactly the kind of gap that short-term borrowing can help you bridge.

The same cash gap can happen with hiring. Maybe you need three months to hire and train someone before they’re fully able to generate enough revenue to pay for themselves. You can wait until you’ve saved enough cash to cover those three months, while continuing to turn down the opportunities that person would allow you to take on. Or you can borrow enough to cover the gap, with a plan for how to earn it back.

The farther away the payoff gets, though, the more variables you’re betting on:

Can you execute?
Did you hire the right person?
Will the market look the same?

Borrowing to cover a three-month gap that you know will be paid off in six months is a different proposition from borrowing for a year and hoping years two and three go according to plan.

When used well, debt is a tool. The more certain you are about what you can earn when you use it, the less stressful it will be to pay back.

2. Royalties

Royalties are typically tied to intellectual property.

For example, you created a design, a name, an idea, a piece of content, or something else that somebody wants to use. You maintain ownership of it, and they pay you for the right to use it. That payment might happen monthly or quarterly, or it might be a percentage or fixed amount tied to every sale.

The basic idea is: your brain came up with something, somebody else can make money using it, and you get paid for that.

Maybe you came up with a good business idea, got it off the ground, and realized you do not actually want to run that business. You may not have to sell the whole thing. You could maintain ownership, license it to someone else for two years, let them run with it, and see how it goes while collecting some amount of royalty income along the way.

Or maybe you invented a new style of water bottle and patented it, but you have absolutely no desire to spend your days in the water-bottle-making business. Someone else does. Great. Let them make the water bottles and pay you 10 cents for every one they sell.

The moral of the story here is you don’t have to make a business around every good idea you have. Sometimes the idea can simply become another source of cash flow.

3. Revenue shares

This is the one I think people underutilize the most.

You probably have relationships, referrals, or even work you’re already doing with other businesses where money is changing hands because of something you helped create:

There’s a market you don’t serve, but you have great relationships with people who need that service.
Your clients routinely need something adjacent to what you do, and you have a company you trust to handle it.
You and another business want to sell something together without merging your companies or starting an entirely new one.

You can make agreements that allow you to share in the cash flow. An affiliate agreement is a revenue share. So are referral and co-sale agreements.

If I’m out in the world talking to someone and realize I can help them solve a problem with someone else’s products or services, I don’t need to be hired as a member of your sales team. I can simply refer you the sale, and we can have an agreement that says I get a percentage.

Does every referral need a revenue share? Probably not. But if you have trusted partners and you’re sending them a lot of business, it could be worth a conversation.

Money feelings

A lot of our attitudes about borrowing money come from our personal experiences with debt.

For example, while the Great Depression was almost 100 years ago, many of us still have a family money memory of debt that ruined lives. Maybe you’ve been told “never a borrower nor a lender be.” Families pass down attitudes toward risk based on their experiences. And for many founders, these legacy attitudes join you in conversations about money.

This is part of your founder journey. You don’t have to use debt financing if you don’t want to. You don’t have to monetize referral relationships. If hearing “consider a line of credit” hurts in your soul, then don’t do it. But part of being an entrepreneur is recognizing when we have limits that aren’t about our skills but about our beliefs.

You have more ways to make money than you think

Sure, each of these options can get complicated.

You need to understand the terms, do your research, and probably talk to the appropriate professionals or lawyers before you start signing loan documents, licensing intellectual property, or creating revenue-share agreements.

But your options right now are likely bigger than:

“I sell (fill-in-the-blank product or service).”

You have relationships. You have ideas. You may have intellectual property. You may even have opportunities where the cash flow doesn’t perfectly match the timing of the work. All of those are potential monetization opportunities that don’t require you to start a new company or compromise what’s precious to you.

How to Fund Your Business Without Investors: 3 Options