Disclaimer: I am currently building my first product and have no idea how any of this works.
In this day and age where almost every service you’ll ever need in tech offers a free tier and is reasonably affordable for scale, why do startups need funding?
For example, I am a relatively talented full-stack dev, if I were to build a website/app I can do it all by myself in a reasonable amount of time. I do understand that this is not the case for everyone, but for those that it is, why can’t they do this:
Build a product -> get a few users -> (make money from those sales ->) put that money into marketing -> get more users -> more money -> bigger marketing -> repeat
I’m more surprised when I read that a SaaS received funding because they usually don’t need a huge research and development team that a company like OpenAI would need nor do they depend on ad revenue which pays cents.
Yes. You just need people. Having money just mean you can have more people. But there is other ways to get people to join you.