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Uma Venugopal

Founders who have raised before: One advice you'd give to a fellow founder raising pre-seed.

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Calling all the brilliant founders who've developed nerves of steel in fundraising, what are a few pieces of advice you'd like to offer from your personal journey in raising funds from angels/VCs?

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Guillaume Sá
Never give up
John Koo
Numbers shine more than flashy presentations. I've seen many entrepreneurs/founders try so hard to make the pitch deck flashy but those presentations that stole my attention were the ones with presenting their numbers at the beginning (how many customers, revenues, or any metric that your idea is actually working)
Saul Fleischman
Read Crossing the Chasm - to know how far you have to go to get conservatives to buy from you. Read Venture Deals (Brad Feld) to be prepared and not get ripped off by vulture capitalists.
Vladimir Rigenco
I am looking for some answers here as well as we start our fundraising very soon. We tried last year in October, but there was a lot of uncertainty in the market and as far as my knowledge goes, fundraising at the end of the year is tricky and difficult as many VC's go offline or on vacation right after Thanksgiving. I was lucky to speak to a few investors, securing about 8 meetings, but that's not enough. A friend of mine, founder of another startup had more than 50 meetings with investors to secure his pre-seed funding last year.
Vladimir Rigenco
@uma_venugopal What I have personally noticed this year is that investors are more confident now in then last year Q4, however, the expectations are much higher then before. Startups do need to work a bit harder to prove their numbers even on a pre-seed stage. If you are on the "Idea or Concept" stage, show that there is a strong backing from potential customers. If you are past that and released an MVP, show proof of concept or small revenue (some kind of traction in a sense) that validates your MVP launch, and the same thing goes to later stages. It is true, that valuations have dropped for every round of fundraising, but equity giveaway increased. For now our focus is on concept validation (to bring more numbers to the table) before I start my fundraising journey in the next two weeks.
Mohamed Zakarya
Launching soon!
Would love to know as well, would be very helpful for securing our seed round