It's going back a bit but when I co-founded a company my wife and I effectively had no money that wasn't already committed to paying for other things (she was at law school which we were paying for using our own savings).

However, what we did have was a contract from a client giving my co-founder and I a years guaranteed work. In that year we found enough additional work to raise the headcount to four people and be fairly profitable - which we used to support the work required to eventually get VC investment and switch to product development. We got our first round about 2 years after we actually started trading.