[Kelbit]

"Never" is far too strong a word here. There's more to the startup world than SaaS.

Good luck launching a consumer hardware product without raising money if you're not independently wealthy. Even getting a relatively simple product to mass production is going to take on the order of 12-18 months and 1-2 million: you've got several iterations of prototyping and testing, UL/IEC approvals, set-up at a CM, and the long tail of retail to deal with. If you have something truly innovative, consider adding an order of magnitude to that cost estimate.

[sheetjs]

The title is clickbait. The real message is to avoid raising money if you are in a desperate spot. The deals may not be favorable and you need to be able to say no, and you can't say no if you feel desperation.

[ttul]

Nobody ever _wants_ to raise money. You raise money when you _can_ or when you _have to_, in that order. If you're Slack or one of a very tiny number of other startups that are vastly successful because they hit it out of the park on every metric, money raises itself at a price you can't turn down. For everyone else, you raise when you can, or when you have to. And it's not always pretty, because if the future was risk free, you wouldn't be running a startup.