1. Save! Save! Save!

This is perhaps the best way of raising funds for your startup business. By just living frugally, there are a million ways that let you make huge savings. While this does not mean that you starve yourself or live the life of a pauper, you can avoid wasteful spending and live with a little less of luxury to have some bucks extra in your pocket. Couponing and various Target promo codes are also a good way to save on your grocery shopping and not only!

2. Go for Crowd-funding

While crowd-funding through sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter can see you competing for the same pool of funds with thousands of other people, the possibility of getting innumerable funding offers from different corners of the country or even the globe is what is most attractive about this method. However, there is one major drawback here: your business idea will be open to millions of people across the world and could even be stolen.

3. Seek Funding from Friends & Family

Many small business owners get funding from their family members and friends. However, you need to be careful not to take advantage of the good relationship between you and these people to waste and squander their hard-earned money through a poorly-planned and executed business plan. You will definitely need them in your life more than the banks and other entities who could have given you a loan instead!

4. Go for Grants & Angel Capital

Through grants and angel capital, money is provided to entrepreneurs free of charge to support business ideas and startup companies to pick up. Among the major factors that individuals and entities who give this kind of funding look for are the strength of your business idea, how promising it is, as well as its level of innovativeness. With angel investors, however, you will often be asked to give up a significant part of the shares of your company in return for the funding.

5. Work Part-time

If you feel that what you are earning now is not enough to save significant amounts of money to fund your startup business, then there is something else that you can save on and use elsewhere: time! For instance, all those hours that you waste in the traffic jam in the evenings or watching TV at home, why not use them to do a part-time job and get the funds to finance your business?

6. Take a Loan

When you are starting a business, you can consider taking a loan. Some of the many types of loans available in the financial markets include:

• Microloans: small loans given through community sources, by online lenders, peer lending groups, etc. Get more details about these from websites such as Lendingclub.com and Prosper.com.
• Business Loans: given by a bank according to your credit-worthiness.
• Home Equity Line of Credit: a bank can also give you a loan calculated as a percentage of the appraised value of your home, sometimes as high as 75%.
• SBA-Guaranteed Loans: given through your bank in collaboration with your SBA district office.

7. Participate in a Contest to Win Funding

A number of companies, individuals and even government agencies have come forward to acknowledge the need for young people to be supported to start small businesses. They organize and hold contests where participants pitch ideas and compete against each other to fund them. A good example here is the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge that offers annual rewards of $50,000 (plus another $50,000 in AWS credits to businesses), as well as the US President Obama-initiated Global Entrepreneurship Summit that supports small technology and business innovators across the globe.