I'm Fundraising Right Now. Here's How I'm Doing the Boring Stuff Without Bleeding Money.

I'm in the middle of a raise. We're signing ASAs, and like every founder in this market, I'm counting every single penny.

When you're raising a few hundred thousand - which, let's be honest, doesn't last long in the UK - you become ruthless about cost. Every monthly subscription feels like a small betrayal. Every service that wants a recurring fee plus a commission on your raise feels faintly outrageous when the raise itself is the thing you're trying to protect. So my default, like a lot of founders right now, became: I'll do it myself. I've got Claude. I'll build what I need.

And to be fair, that instinct gets you surprisingly far. But it taught me something I didn't expect, which is the whole reason I'm writing this.

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Here's the trap I walked into.

I needed to do all the unglamorous fundraising admin properly. Track the ASAs we're signing. Collect signatures. Record everything cleanly. Model how the shareholding will look once those investments convert into equity. Work out how that picture shifts when my CTO starts vesting his options. Standard stuff - but stuff that genuinely matters, because getting it wrong now means an expensive mess later.

So I went hunting the cheap way. I asked founder friends for ASA templates. I looked for the cheapest possible tool to collect signatures. I started piecing together my own way to record it all and model the conversions. And yes, I used Claude to automate chunks of it and stitch it into something usable.

But two things became obvious, fast.

First, Claude doesn't have 14+ years of experience managing cap tables. It doesn't know all the ins and outs, the edge cases, the things that quietly go wrong at conversion that an experienced equity team has seen a hundred times. It's brilliant at helping - it is not a substitute for that institutional knowledge.

Second, building it yourself takes time - and worse, without knowing what "good" actually looks like, you're walking in the dark. You don't know what you don't know. You can't tell whether the thing you've built is right until the moment it matters, which is the worst possible moment to find out it isn't.

I was saving money and spending something more valuable: time, and peace of mind, during the one period where I have neither to spare.

I'll be honest about my own stubbornness here. Part of my resistance wasn't really about money. It was about independence - the founder instinct to own everything, control everything, not be locked into anyone else's platform. There's a romance to the scrappy DIY approach, and I was fully bought into it.

Eventually I gave in and actually signed up to Carta - specifically their free Launch tier - and tested the whole thing myself.

I wish I'd done it the week before.

The thing that surprised me is how much is genuinely there for free. The Launch tier is for companies under 25 stakeholders with less than £1M raised - which is most of us at this stage - and within that, the real founder toolkit is mostly included.

You can issue and track equity, model fundraising rounds with a SAFE/ASA and notes calculator, generate equity plans for employees and advisors, and create and issue SAFEs/ASAs directly. It becomes your single source of truth - every security you issue lands officially on your cap table, in one electronic record, instead of scattered across email threads and spreadsheets.

But the parts that actually solved my specific problems were these:

Round modelling. The exact thing I was trying to build by hand - model how the shareholding looks when ASAs convert, and how vesting affects the picture - is just there. I can model dilution scenarios before signing anything, so I walk into a conversation knowing how a round reshapes my cap table instead of finding out afterwards.

S/EIS advance assurance. Most UK angels rely on these tax reliefs. Having eligibility surfaced and HMRC submissions kept organised makes me materially more attractive to exactly the investors I'm talking to right now.

Companies House registers and filings. The statutory admin that normally lands on the founder or the lawyer is maintained and filed directly, which closes the compliance gaps that otherwise pile up quietly.

A data room and investor updates. When a term sheet lands I'm not scrambling to build an ad hoc Google Drive folder - there's a proper data room, plus a way to share my deck and send investor updates without paying for yet another tool.

None of this is flashy. It's just the precise list of things I was trying to duct-tape together myself, done properly, by people who do it for a living.

Two things I want to be straight about.

First, the model. This is land-and-expand. It's free now, and you start paying once you grow past those thresholds, or need things like a 409A valuation or complex multi-country plans. But that's genuinely the right trade for an early founder. You don't pay until you've raised real money and can afford it - and you avoid the biggest hidden cost in this whole category, which isn't a subscription at all. It's ripping your cap table off one system at Series A and rebuilding it on another, with legal fees attached. Starting somewhere that scales with you avoids that entirely.

Second, and more importantly: Carta sponsors our newsletter, and writing this piece is part of that arrangement. I'm telling you that openly because you deserve to know it.

But here's the thing - everything in this post is based on my actual experience. I tried the cheap DIY way first. I fought for my independence. I wasted time. And then I signed up, tested it all myself, and found it genuinely solved the problems I'd been struggling with. I would not have agreed to write this if I couldn't vouch for it from my own experience. That's the only reason it exists.

Cutting costs doesn't mean cutting corners on the things that compound. The cap table you bodge together today is the clean-up bill you pay at your seed round. And the hours you spend building your own version of something that already exists - for free - are hours you're not spending on the actual raise.

I learned this the slow way, mid-raise, which is the worst time to learn anything. So if you're where I was a few weeks ago - fundraising, broke, stubborn, armed with Claude and a folder of borrowed templates - let me save you the detour.

Do the boring stuff properly, do it early, and do it for free while you still can. I wish I had.

✅ Know a founder mid-raise trying to do everything themselves to save money? Forward this their way. The sooner they stop reinventing the cap table and start spending those hours on the actual raise, the better the round they'll close this year.

DISCLOSURE: This publication contains general information only and eShares, Inc. dba Carta, Inc. (“Carta”) is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services.  This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business or interests.  Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business or interests, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.  This publication is not intended as a recommendation, offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security.  Carta does not assume any liability for reliance on the information provided herein. © 2026 eShares, Inc. dba Carta, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

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