Reframe it. You're not spending money, you're investing it. Spending $500 on marketing will get you $2000 in sales if you do it right. Spending $100k on enginee

Reframe it. You're not spending money, you're investing it. Spending $500 on marketing will get you $2000 in sales if you do it right. Spending $100k on engineer salaries will help you build a product that can generate $1M/yr in revenue, etc. This is why they say you have to spend money to make money. Your raise size sounds like seed or series A funding, so chances are you're not yet at the point where money spent has direct payoffs. You may not have figured out a profitable marketing spend strategy yet, for instance. That's OK. That's exactly what this money is for and why your investors invested in it. What they expect you to do right now is to invest that money in learning. Spend that money making experiments and making mistakes. So that by the end of that 18-24 months of runway you'll know how to consistently turn $500 of ad spend into $2k or more of sales. Once you have that formula down you'll be in the right place to raise a series B round and build a highly profitable or sellable company - which is what you and your investors want. You want to get to a place where you can say "invest $1M in us and we know how to turn that into $20M in sales."