How to save money when launching your startup

Starting a business is expensive. There are countless things that you have to pay for – legals, website development, coding, design, and so on.

The question is, what things can you do to save money? Here are five top tips that may be obvious but worth remembering when you’re starting your company:

1. Save on legal fees when starting up
2. Use free or low-cost tools
3. Keep your team small and outsource non-core functions
4. Find funding for your business
5. Be frugal with marketing

Tip #1: Save on legal fees when starting up

When you’re incorporating your company, you probably don’t need to hire a lawyer. At this stage, most early tasks can be handled through low-cost platforms like SeedLegals, which make it easy to:

• Incorporate your company
• Create non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
• Build your cap table
• Generate founder agreements
• Create a financial model

These services provide easy access to the documents you need, typically for a small monthly fee rather than thousands of pounds upfront.

Of course, you may need a lawyer later for more complex matters, but when you’re just starting out, you can save a significant amount by using online platforms.

Tip #2: Use free or low-cost tools

Before you hire expensive web developers or pitch deck designers, try one of the many AI-powered sites that can help you create a website or deck without needing to code. These tools let you build professional-looking assets yourself – saving you the cost of paying someone else to do it.

Tip #3: Keep your team small and outsource non-core functions

If you’re building an app or website, see if you can prototype it yourself before hiring developers. Developers are expensive – and much of the early work often gets thrown away once you start testing with real users. Instead, you can use no-code tools like Figma, Canva, or other prototyping platforms to build early versions yourself and create clickable versions of your app. You can also use newer platforms like Lovable (one of the fastest-growing startups globally) to create simple prototypes or even basic working apps without hiring a developer.

When you’re ready to build your real app, you’ll probably need to bring in developers. Today’s AI tools are great for creating simple prototypes but not full-scale apps. The key is to use these tools early: every time a user struggles with your design, you can tweak the wording or move buttons yourself – without paying for expensive re-coding. Once users clearly understand and navigate your prototype, that’s the right time to invest in building the real thing.

Tip #4: Find funding for your business

If your business needs money to build a product and grow, either you’ll be paying for it yourself, or you’ll need other people to fund it. So your choices are:

1. Put your own money into it
2. Get money from grants and so on
3. Borrow money from the bank
4. Raise money from VCs
5. Raise money from angel investors

Let’s go through these quickly and see what’s likely to work and what’s not.

Self-funding: Start with your own money if you can

It’s easier to not have to raise money, so if you can fund it yourself, try to do it yourself. Our SeedLegals data shows that founders put a median of about £25,000 of their own money into a company before they raise external investment.

At some point, you may run out of personal funds or hit a ceiling on how much progress you can make without external support. That’s when you’ll need to look for other sources of funding to keep growing.

Grants: Nice if you can get them

You can try applying for grants, but they are often slow, highly competitive and usually limited to specific industries or university spinouts. Grants are worth trying for if you qualify, but they shouldn’t be your main plan.

Venture Capital: Often only interested at a later stage

If you go to a VC too early, before you’ve got revenue, inevitably they’ll say “Love what you’re doing, come back later.” So VCs are probably a waste of time until you’ve got paying users.

Bank loans: Rare for early-stage startups

You can only get a loan from a bank if your company is already making revenue and profits, so you can afford to repay it. Otherwise, you risk going bankrupt. That’s why startups rarely borrow money from banks – first, because banks won’t lend to companies without revenue, and second, because without income, you’re unlikely to be able to repay the debt when it’s due.

Angel investors: The most realistic option

This is why most early-stage startups raise money from angel investors. Angel investors are individuals who typically invest anywhere from £500 to £20,000. The goal is to find several angel investors to raise £50,000 to a few hundred thousand pounds to help fund your business.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a money-saving tip – but it’s a way to conserve your own money by having other people invest their money in your startup.

Tip #5: Be frugal with marketing

Do everything you can to avoid paying Google or Facebook for ads. They already have way more money than you – don’t give them even more until you’ve proven you’ve got a proper business model, where you’re making more from a customer (known as the lifetime value, or LTV) than you spend on acquiring them (known as the customer acquisition cost, or CAC).

The problem is, you’ve built your app, your website is live… and nobody’s coming. So how do you fix that?

The obvious answer is to buy pay-per-click ads on Google or social networks (PPC). But unless you’ve already proven that people will buy your product, you’ll just be spending a lot of money acquiring users who bail shortly afterwards.

You want to do everything you can to avoid that. Only start buying paid ads once you’ve raised seed or Series A funding, have plenty of cash in the bank and have proven product-market fit. That’s when you’re ready to scale.

In the meantime, focus on things like content marketing (writing articles and getting them published online), posting regularly on LinkedIn and using SEO (writing articles on your own website that rank well in search). If your customers form communities, lean into community-led growth – join those communities and build relationships. Partnerships with other companies are also a great way to get inbound links and referral traffic.

Whatever you do, avoid paying for ads until you’ve proven your business and revenue model.

Where to find more support for your startup

Starting a company isn’t easy – and figuring out where to spend (and where to save) can make all the difference early on. Hopefully, these tips have given you a few ideas to keep costs down while keeping your business moving forward.

And if you want more real-world advice from people who’ve been through the journey themselves, join us at one of our free events or webinars. You’ll hear from me and some incredible guest speakers, plus you’ll become part of a growing founder and investor community.

Need hands-on help?

If you need a hand with your cap table, fundraising, legal documents like employment agreements, share option schemes, or anything else, our team is here to help.

Get in touch – we’ve helped thousands of founders do it faster, cheaper, and with a lot less stress.