At our latest Startup Networking Workshop at Station F, two founders sat down with a problem that will sound familiar to almost everyone building a company. They had a product they believed in, a market they understood, and almost no cash. To grow, they were sure they needed to raise a round. By the end of the conversation, they were not so sure.
Their story is worth telling, because it shows that the two biggest reasons founders raise money – acquiring users and paying a team – can often be solved without raising any cash at all.
Back at the starting line
This was not their first venture. For about a year they had run a high-end creative production business, making content for major brands and well-known artists. It taught them the market, and it taught them its frustrations. The AI tools they relied on were too limited, and collaborating across a dozen different platforms and providers was painful. Every project became a scramble to find the right files, the right tools, and the right people.
So they did what good founders do: they built the thing they wished existed.
From frustrated users to product builders
Out of that frustration came two products. The first is a collaborative platform for creating content with AI – a shared workspace where a whole team can work on the same project instead of stitching together separate tools. The second is a platform that helps content creators earn a living, by letting a community set challenges and pay creators for the work they commission.
They had launched only two weeks before the workshop. Their ambition is refreshingly honest: as one of them put it, they do not want to become a unicorn – they want to become a pony. A sustainable, profitable business they control, built on transparency rather than hype.
But a young platform with no cash faces two hard walls. The first: how do you get enough users? The second: how do you build the team to serve them? Both, normally, cost money you do not have – which is exactly why founders raise.
Problem 1: attracting users without burning cash
Growth costs money. The usual playbook is to raise a round, then spend it on customer acquisition – ads, referral schemes, and sign-up incentives. But there is a hidden cost. To fund those bonuses, you sell equity to financial investors whose only contribution is cash, and who dilute you fast in exchange for nothing but money.
FlexUp offers a different route. Instead of raising cash from investors to pay bonuses to users, give the bonus directly to the users themselves – paid in FlexUp credits.
Imagine offering every creator who signs up and starts posting 50 € in credits. That credit is not cash out of your pocket; it is a stake in your platform. Overnight, your users stop being customers and become associates. They now have two reasons to care about your success: they use the platform, and they own a piece of it. They promote it, they stay, and as the company grows, their stake grows in value with it.
And it scales beautifully. One hundred creators is good. One hundred thousand creators, each holding a small stake they want to see grow, is a growth engine – and none of it came out of your bank account. You can even tier it: 50 € for signing up and posting, more for hitting bigger milestones.
Worried about giving away too much of your company? The FlexUp model includes a buy-back option. Once the business generates enough cash, you can buy those stakes back on agreed terms – for example, repaying holders a healthy multiple of their original value. They win, because their stake appreciated; you win, because you can reclaim it if the company takes off. Everyone stays aligned.
Problem 2: building a team you cannot yet pay
The founders' second problem was even more familiar: they needed developers and marketers, and could not match market salaries in cash.
This is FlexUp at its most basic. You pay part of the salary in cash and part in equity – credits – so the person you hire becomes an associate, not just an employee. What makes it work is transparency: instead of vague stock options bolted onto a low salary, you state the full, competitive salary clearly, then explain which part you are asking them to invest back into the company. People can see they are valued fairly, and that they are becoming genuine partners in what they build.
It also filters for the right people. State plainly in the job advert that part of the pay is equity, and those who only want a fixed salary self-select out, while those with a startup mindset lean in. In practice, the best candidates are often freelancers, remote workers, and international profiles who are already comfortable with risk – people who value a guaranteed base plus real upside over a rigid pay cheque.
Compare that to the classic trap. I often think of a company I was once recruited to lead, where brilliant engineers were paid a fraction of the market rate on the promise of stock options. Years later they were still underpaid, still holding the same options, and carrying far more risk than at the start – with no sense of what their equity was worth, and no recognition of the work they kept contributing every month. FlexUp is designed to fix exactly that: value the work, value the risk, and make both visible.
The bigger point
Step back, and something clicks. The two things this pair of founders were about to raise money for – acquiring users and hiring a team – are the two things a huge number of startups raise for. And both can be paid in equity instead of cash.
That does not mean you never raise money. It means you can raise less, raise later, and raise on better terms – because you are no longer forced to sell your company to financial investors just to cover the cost of growth. Instead, you share ownership with the people who actually build and grow your business: your team and your users.
For two founders who wanted to build a pony, not a unicorn, that was exactly the point.
Want to join our next workshop?
We run these Startup Networking Workshops regularly, in person at Station F and online. Come with a real problem – you may leave with a very different way of solving it.
See upcoming dates at www.flexup.org/events.
Further reading
- Explore the FlexUp economic model, and how credits and tokens work, at www.flexup.org/economic-model.
- Browse past workshop recaps at Blogs - Workshops.
Workshop #21 - The two cheques you don't need to write