Now, this is the kind of article Forbes is good at. Writing in forbes.com, Kevin Ready summarizes 6 reasons why you should seek external funding.
The most important, to us, is that external funding reduces the risk to you and your partners, if you have any.
It’s also a good validation of your idea, if you can convince someone else with money to part with it to support your enterprise.
Launching with your own funds while seeking outside funding is a good idea, because you might be on the way to proof of concept while you’re looking for funds, and you at least have something to show potential investors.
However, seeking external funding is time consuming, and takes away from running the business, such as it is. But, once you have external funding, running the business becomes a little less nerve-wracking, and you can take advantage of prudent (not all) opporutnities.
We happen to have a course on startup funding, A11, Funding a New Business. It covers considerably more than venture capital, which is the route everyone thinks they must take.
Here’s the link to Kevin’s article: http://forbes.com/sites/kevinready/2012/09/18/do-startups-need-funding-anymore/