Also one other comment on using services from like SCORE (and there are others like them). If you use them to help many times local banks (and definitely SBA loans) will give you preferred rates/access as they consider it a risk reduction that you have "professional" guidance. Honestly some of the advice I got a couple of times was wacky shit that in no way helped my business, but it helped me secure a loan so it was worth every minute of my time.

Tech people forget that 90+% of small business exists outside of tech and use these services all the time to grow cause they can't raise VC funding. There are a ton of resources available to us, we just have to not always look for tech only solutions/providers. I am also not saying these services are always easy or good, so you still have to do some homework, but in terms of percentages of businesses that get local loans vs VC dollars it is pretty one sided not favoring VC's. Of course you also aren't getting $10M of cash and no payback terms when you go to a bank, you are getting 5-250k typically, although $1-5M not out of the question once you have built up to it and prove the business supports those value. I have a friend who's small real estate investing business has over $1M in line of credit from 2 local banks, that's how he flips houses and remodels his rentals before sale etc. And his entire business is just him, and he subs out all work.

Yes, it sometimes takes a little extra effort with some specific lenders of course but very doable. Overall a SaaS business to most banks is a subscription business much like a local gym, martial arts studio, etc so it isn't a foreign business model like tech people think, it is a little harder to loan against those models without any track record however. So if you have no clients and no proof it works no one (even in tech banking) will debt finance you without going the investor/angel route.

If using collateral they ask a lot less questions of course, but they'll still want to see you have a real business. Anytime you work with banks you have to be prepared to show financial statements, subscriber growth, retention, attrition etc as they look at that to gauge risk.

I got my last consulting business financing through a local bank so I could have a line of credit to smooth out payroll/operational costs, because I had a problem in a prior business that failed where it was cash flow not revenue that forced us under. In that business we had plenty of receivables but not enough float to hold us through the long 30-60 day payment cycles of many clients at the time. So when I did a new consulting business (that was successful) I made sure to get a line of credit as quickly as possible from a local bank that then helped me smooth out operational costs/payroll while collecting my payments because no way factoring was going to work. In general the "best" rates in factoring are for physical shipped products, worst rates are for services since there is way more risk on services.