How did you start doing your own thing?

Small business loans can be hard to get unless you are an established business. Credit cards, however, are not. If you only need $10k, that’s usually the easiest way, unless you can get it from family and friends. Also, almost every business loan at this scale will require your personal guaranty and have pretty onerous repayment terms, so it’s basically a personal loan anyway. You can’t shut the business and walk away from repayment. Once you have existing cash flow there are better financing options.

That’s how my business was started- less than $10k credit card debt to start (materials, initial manufacturing run), fulfilled out of my garage. Then just bootstrapped it up with sales proceeds and small loans, until I could setup my own manufacturing facility. Takes a long time that way, and you’re constantly scraping by, but the risk of spectacular failure is much lower.