When Magdaline Hurtado-Rosario launched her hair accessory brand HelloUpdo in March 2020, she was an MBA student at American University with $30,000 in savings and a plan to bootstrap the business. That nest egg was not enough to cover the first-time entrepreneur’s growing list of costs–like silk fabric, software subscriptions, travel to trade shows, and her Shopify account–so she started pulling out her personal credit card.
