How to Build a Startup from Scratch and Reach Series A

Starting your own business can be an overwhelming process, to put it mildly. You may have created a groundbreaking product or service, but your creation isn’t going to sell itself (or market itself, or fund itself, or set up its own LLC). The best way for new entrepreneurs to get their idea off the ground is by launching their own startup.

Building a startup involves multiple distinct phases, each with its own challenges, milestones, and financial requirements. An average timeline may stretch over about 36 months, beginning with preliminary research and ending with seven-figure funding. To find success, new entrepreneurs often need to know how to move from one stage of the timeline to the next without running out of cash or momentum.

This guide serves as a practical roadmap for founders building startups from scratch, covering five phases from idea validation through Series A readiness. We’ll break down what you may expect at each step and how to prepare for different levels of funding. You’ll also learn about Slash, a business banking platform purpose-built to help new founders move nimbly and save capital.¹ Not only does Slash offer features like cash back rewards and diverse payment rails, but startups that use our platform also gain access to a community of founders beginning the same journey.

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What Is a Startup? Understanding the Basics

A startup is a separate concept from a small business, even though some may use the two terms interchangeably. A startup is an entity often designed to search for an innovative, repeatable, and scalable business model. They’re usually built to grow revenue dramatically without proportionally increasing costs.

Startups typically build new products, attack new markets, or apply new business models to existing industries. This can create higher risk than traditional businesses, but can also lead to the rapid growth that venture capital funds seek. Investor capital is often a large part of a startup’s growth process, as they may operate at a loss for months or even years. That’s because startups typically aren’t selling a service or product out of the gate; they’re developing a concept that can fundamentally disrupt a given industry.

Small businesses, on the other hand, aim for sustainable growth from year one. They do this by mimicking a consistent business model rather than transforming one. Small businesses typically begin their operations by selling their product, and rely partly on customer revenue to fund their early stages rather than investors or firms.

A new diner that serves a combination of breakfast food and Mexican favorites would be considered a small business. A platform that uses AI technology to revolutionize the way restaurants source ingredients would be considered a startup.

While startups often “change the game” in their respective industries, you don’t necessarily need to begin with a revolutionary idea. Many successful startups tweak and improve upon existing business models. For example, Liquid Death grew from a 2018 startup to a $1.4 billion company in less than eight years. Their initial business model was selling water, one of the oldest commodities on earth. Liquid Death simply repackaged it – literally – and their startup took off.

Phase 1: Pre-Launch Foundation (Months 1-3)

The pre-launch phase involves ideation and preparation. A founder may have a complete picture of the product or service they want to create, but they should first determine their target audience and the infrastructure they’ll need.

Validate Your Startup Idea

Idea validation happens through market research, customer discovery, and competitive analysis. It’s often good to define a precise target customer. "Small business owners" is too broad, but "marketing agencies with 5-20 employees struggling with ad reach" gives you someone specific to talk to. Research market size, growth trends, and what customers currently spend on solutions to the problem you want to solve. It can be helpful to speak with potential customers directly and ask about their pain points, what they've used to try to solve the problem, and how much is in their budget for a solution.

Analyzing the competitive landscape can help give you a frame of reference around how your product stands out. Research competitors, explore their accomplishments and mistakes, and determine how your company may fit in among them. You may identify notable market gaps that can help guide your startup’s messaging and goals.

Ultimately, you’ll come away knowing what customers want most, what current solutions aren’t offering them, and the price point that fits best.

Choose Your Business Structure

Before officially forming an entity, startups must choose the business structure that works best for them. Two of the most common options for new companies are LLCs and corporations.

LLCs offer flexibility through limited liability protection, simplified governance, and profits that pass through to the LLC owner’s tax returns. With an LLC, a founder’s personal assets are protected against outstanding business debts.

A corporation is a separate legal entity that provides a more rigid structure that’s suitable for raising capital, though they face stricter compliance rules and can face double taxation (corporate tax + dividend tax). Corporations can be “C-Corps”, which allow for unlimited shareholders and easier access to investors, or “S-Corps” which offer limited liability protection without double taxation.

A lot of factors can go into the decision between the two, but one of the most important ones can actually be the state you live in or plan to move to. LLCs can access financial and asset protection advantages when they form in states like Nevada, Wyoming, and Arizona. Corporations that form in Delaware get access to dedicated corporate laws and are subject to zero income tax if they operate outside the state.

C-Corps that form in Delaware can roll forward financial losses to offset future gains, turning early losses into future tax advantages. For this reason, about 68% of Fortune 500 companies incorporate in the state.

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Slash goes above with better controls, better rewards, and better support for your business.

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Set Up Essential Financial Infrastructure

New founders will want to choose a bank that understands startups and offers tools beyond basic checking accounts. Startup-friendly banks often offer business cards with strong cash back, support multiple payment rails, and come without minimum balance requirements. These banking solutions should scale with your business and help it grow from month 1 to month 101.

Startups should also utilize financial tracking tools that categorize each expense, create easy-to-follow audit trails, and unlock clear access to their cash flow. This becomes especially important when businesses begin to attract investors who scrutinize their financial health and revenue models.

Founders may find themselves making the mistake of committing to too many tools and solutions to stay on top of their finances. They actually only need a singular banking platform: Slash. With Slash, founders get access to a dedicated financial dashboard that tracks all business expenses and ingoing/outgoing payments in real time. We also integrate with popular accounting solutions like QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Sage Intacct, allowing new founders to keep their finances organized and shift their focus to rapid growth.

Phase 2: Building Your Minimum Viable Product (Months 3-6)

Next, you’ll develop an early version of your product or service that serves as a proof of concept. This is known as your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Your MVP

Eric Ries, who popularized the MVP concept, defined the term as "that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." The minimum viable product contains just enough features for early adopters to solve their problem or be satisfied with their purchase.

Your customer discovery interviews will likely help you identify where to start. Which capabilities must exist for the product to deliver any value? Which features did customers emphasize repeatedly? Which problems are they currently struggling to solve with current workarounds? Your MVP should specifically aim at these hurdles.

A common mistake entrepreneurs make is building for everyone instead of just early adopters. Attempting to quickly complete your creation and achieve instant perfection is unrealistic and unnecessary. Your first customers will likely understand that your “beta” product may be rough around the edges, and you can get valuable feedback from early mistakes. At the end of the day, the "viable" part of MVP means the product must work for its intended purpose, not that it must include every feature you envision in the final stage.

Establish Financial Controls

As you build out your MVP, spending often accelerates. This is the part where startups may create a budget that anticipates expenses like development costs, software subscriptions, contractor payments, legal fees, founder salaries, and marketing experiments. With clear budgeting, you can forecast your expenses and ensure you’ve got enough capital to move to upcoming stages.

The cash flow forecasting tools found on the Slash platform allow users to easily access their finances in real-time and get an accurate picture of the past and future of their spending. For startups who begin with a team of founders and employees, Slash also offers unlimited virtual business cards and expense management tools that automatically track and categorize business purchases the moment they happen. With the Slash Visa® Platinum Card, you can also receive up to 2% cash back on each expense, returning valuable capital to founders that can help their startups through early development.

Phase 3: Early Traction and Pre-Seed (Months 6-12)

Next, you’ll be analyzing early customer feedback and preparing for your first round of investor activity.

Launch and Initial Customer Acquisition

After iterating on the feedback from your MVP’s initial trials, you’ll be ready to launch a version that’s closer to the finished product. While your early adopters may have included friends, family, and business contacts, your launch will target your prospective user base. This means it’s time to spread the word and acquire customers.

When it comes to marketing and sales strategies, every startup is different. There’s enough written content on the subject to fill libraries, so we won’t delve into that sort of advice. Acquiring customers shouldn’t be the sole focus of this stage, however. As you attract new users/buyers, you’ll also learn:

How your product or service handles increased demand, and whether your business infrastructure is ready to scale as customers grow from the dozens to the hundreds or thousands
If your revenue model turns enough profit to support continued growth and evolution
What feedback your new customers may have (positive and negative)
How much investment and funding your startup will need going forward to make necessary changes or expand to new markets

You also may want quantitative data in the form of measurable metrics, which will also vary widely based on business model. SaaS companies may track retention and daily active users, while B2C companies that sell products may track customer loyalty rates and gross profit. Metrics like these serve a dual purpose: informing founders about weaknesses that need to be addressed, and informing investors about strengths that may warrant interest.

Prepare for Seed Funding

Seed funding is the first official equity funding stage for a startup, often providing the capital that spurs rapid growth for a new business. While angel investors and loans (and your own bootstraps) may have helped you get your MVP into the hands of consumers, the seed funding round can turn your startup into a fully-fledged company.

As of mid-2024, the median seed stage raised $3 million alongside a median pre-money company valuation of $14.8 million. Don’t be intimidated if you don’t anticipate a 7-figure funding round, as each startup grows uniquely and experiences different cash flows. Ultimately, you’ll want to secure enough funding to hire more employees, fund further product development, and boost your marketing and sales efforts. Thanks to platforms like OpenVC and firms like Y Combinator, finding investors for seed funding isn’t necessarily the significant hurdle it once was.

Along with general data that demonstrates your company’s revenue model, seed round investors will often need specific financial documentation to consider putting down capital. These can include a detailed pitch deck, a 2-5 year financial projection, and a current cap table that shows a company’s ownership structure.

While your primary goal is getting an investor to choose you, don’t forget that you’re also choosing the investor. Beyond capital, investors may provide mentorship, network connections, credibility with customers and future investors, and specific domain expertise. If you have the freedom to make a choice, pick investors who work with companies in your space, understand your business model, and have a strong portfolio.

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Slash goes above with better controls, better rewards, and better support for your business.

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Phase 4: Growth and Hiring (Months 12-18)

If you’ve made it to phase 4, we’d like to congratulate you on receiving your first round of funding. Now you’re ready to keep growing.

Scale Your Operations

The concept of expansion can be intimidating for a new founder, even with an extra injection of funds from investors. Here’s a list of some of the most important things to be mindful of during this stage:

Finalizing the product: If your first release was your MVP, and your following launch was your “almost” Viable Product, you should be putting finishing touches on your product during months 12-18. Further evolution is always an option later on, but you can’t get there without nailing down the base version of the service or product you’re selling.
Hiring new workers: Scaling your team is one of the most important steps of Phase 4. Your first hires may include an engineer that works on product development, a marketing lead that creates a brand identity, and a handful of salespeople that reach out to potential customers.
Identifying issues: When gathering your documentation and metrics for the seed funding round, you may have discovered problems like user churn, thin profit margins, or low customer loyalty. Extra capital alone can’t solve these issues, but product improvements and optimization may be able to.
Building a roadmap: It’s wise for businesses to create a detailed plan that covers several years of future progress. A roadmap may include new product offerings, potential business partnerships, an expansion into international markets, and future fundraising rounds. If you can envision it, you can plan for it.
Ensuring regulations are met: With all the hard work that launching a startup entails, it can be easy for new founders to overlook local legal and tax regulations. Throughout your journey, make sure you register your entity, acquire all applicable business licenses, file necessary trademarks, and follow tax laws.

Phase 5: Scaling Toward Series A (Months 18-36)

Series A funding is one of the biggest steps in the life cycle of any company. Before this funding round, it’s important to make sure your startup has reached certain milestones.

Assessing Your Current Status

There’s often about a year’s worth of time between Phase 4 and Phase 5. Before Series A investors take a look at your company, you as the founder should be confident that your business model can stand up to scrutiny and demonstrate success. While financial metrics can reveal a lot about a company’s operations, you should also ask yourself a set of more qualitative questions, such as:

How is my business faring against competition? Are we fighting to match the innovation our rivals are offering?
Are we pleasing our current investors? Has our company fallen short of the promises we made in the seed round, or are we closely following our roadmap?
Is our customer base growing, or are we closely tied to a particular niche that limits our long-term ceiling?
Are our internal processes efficient, or are functions like hiring, marketing, and procurement causing unnecessary bloat?

Businesses struggling with these issues won’t be able to fix them overnight, and many companies carry similar problems for longer than their first 2-3 years. That said, the more comfortable you are with your own operations, the more comfortable future investors will be offering you capital. Identifying and addressing current pain points will help your company as it enters its next step: Series A funding.

Series A Readiness

Unlike the seed round, Series A funding is almost exclusively raised by institutional investors, including venture capital firms, corporate venture arms, and micro-VCs. In Q4 2025, the median Series A round was over $10 million, and the median pre-money valuation was $78 million.

These investors are interested in specific metrics like annual recurring revenue, which can be $1-2 million among typical Series A startups. They may also ask about your month-over-month growth rates, gross and net profit margins, customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value per customer (LTV), and monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Benchmarks for these metrics vary by industry, so it’s smart to do research to see where you stand.

Series A investors will likely be interested in a couple more details that don’t vary by industry: your go-to-market strategy and your vision for growth. Your go-to-market strategy will cover how your company may launch a new product or enter a new market in the future. If you don’t have any plans to develop new products or attract new customer segments…well, it’s not an excellent sign in the eyes of investors.

You’ll also have the opportunity to discuss future growth, which can end up looking like a new version of your initial roadmap. If your business has been running smoothly to this point, it may be reasonably simple to lay out your next steps, perhaps including entering new verticals, forming new business partnerships, and even selling shares during an IPO.

While this process may seem similar to the earlier seed round, Series A investors have different priorities and expectations. Seed investors bet on early traction, while Series A investors bet on proven business models ready for acceleration. They often expect efficient operations, a clear organizational structure, a demonstrable competitive advantage, and a potential path to $100M+ revenue.

How Slash Can Help Take Startups from Idea to Series A

It’s difficult for a startup to thrive without a brilliant idea that transforms or improves upon an existing industry. It can be even tougher for that startup to succeed without disciplined financial management.

First-time founders that actively track their cash flow, business expenses, and invoices will end up with easier end-of-month reconciliation and a clearer understanding of where they stand financially. At Slash, we do more than help startups with these processes - we automate them. Features like intelligent expense categorization and automated fraud detection give founders time back to focus on growing and preparing for funding stages.

Our solution also integrates with accounting platforms like QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage Intacct, allowing financial information to be exchanged in real time and skipping the tedious process of manually copying data.

We offer a wide variety of features that can offer tangible value to startups, including,

Working capital financing: With Slash’s working capital, users can choose between flexible 30, 60, or 90 day repayment terms.⁵ This allows startups to scale before funding stages while still supporting liquidity for daily operations.
High yield treasury: Many treasury solutions are only available to well-established businesses. At Slash, users can earn 3.83% yield on their idle cash through treasury accounts backed by Morgan Stanley and BlackRock money market funds.⁶ The difference? Our users get access to our treasury accounts on day one, with no minimum balance requirement.
Diverse payment rails: Slash users can send money virtually any way they please, as our platform supports RTP/FedNow, global ACH, domestic wires, and international SWIFT transfers. We also support stablecoins, which turn cryptocurrency into a digital asset that startups can rely on for business transactions.⁴ Slash allows users to hold, send, and receive USD-pegged stablecoins USDC and USDT across nine supported blockchains with dedicated on/off ramps.
Slash Visa® Platinum Card: Earn up to 2% cash back on business expenses, set customizable spending controls and limits, and issue unlimited virtual cards for your team members, vendor payments, and subscriptions.

As a startup ourselves, we know that the best support often goes beyond tools and features. That’s why we bring leaders together in person at our Founders Series events. They give us the opportunity to hear feedback, form real relationships with our current and prospective clients, and bring back that old-fashioned networking spirit. That said, our Founders events are anything but old-fashioned.

In February, we invited founders from around the San Francisco area to run laps around Sonoma Raceway in actual race cars. We’ve also hosted two events at the Golden State Warriors’ Oracle Arena, where we met one of our current business partners and customers, Eragon. If you’re interested in speaking with us outside of an event, or if you just can’t wait for the next one, our office doors are always open for industry leaders who want to speak with the team.

If you’re forming a startup and you’re looking for help organizing your finances, automating your processes, and understanding the entrepreneurial world, you’re in good hands with Slash.

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Frequently asked questions

How much money do I need to start a startup?

The amount of money you need for your startup widely varies based on industry and needs. Online-based SaaS models may be able to get away with beginning their operations for less than $10k. Tech companies, businesses that manufacture products, or startups with storefronts will often need more than $100k to safely launch. It’s best to do research based on your specific situation.

How long does it take to start a startup?

Our 5-phase roadmap may take roughly 36 months, but you don’t have to stick to a strict schedule. The flow of your progress will determine when you reach each phase of the startup’s journey. That said, don’t move too slowly, as a lack of progress can kill momentum.

What's the difference between a startup and a small business?

The difference between the two mainly relates to their ultimate goal as a company. A startup typically searches for an innovative, repeatable, and scalable business model. They’re usually built to grow revenue dramatically without proportionally increasing costs. Startups often build new products, attack new markets, or apply new business models to existing industries.

Small businesses usually aim for sustainable growth from year one. They do this by mimicking a consistent business model rather than transforming one. Small businesses often begin their operations by selling a product or service, and rely partly on customer revenue to fund their early stages rather than investors or firms.