Comment by agentultra
10 months ago
I think you’re getting ahead of yourself. You have $0 in revenue and no business. You don’t raise money on ideas and vibes.
If you have an idea for a business you’d like to build, don’t even worry about the software part yet. Get out there, make cold calls, get customers and do the boring thing with as little or no software. Show there’s demand and that you can make money doing it.
Once you have even a few hundred bucks in revenue, that’s more than $0.
Then write as little software as you can get away with to automate some part of the work you’re doing. See if that translates to more revenue with less effort.
That’s when you start raising from family and friends. You use that money to get some tools you needs, buy some AWS credits, take a few weeks to automate more of the process, hire some people part time to make your cold calls for you/do deliveries/assemble things/configure the giblets/etc, etc.
Once you have self sustaining revenue and a clear path that’s when you raise the seed money to get a dedicated team going. You use that money to expand into new markets, write more software to automate more things that help you grow.
It starts small.
I would say you’re pretty well connected and lucky if you can get someone to give you more than half a million dollars to mess around and find out if you can make a business out of it.
> I think you’re getting ahead of yourself. You have $0 in revenue and no business. You don’t raise money on ideas and vibes.
I mostly agree with you. That being said, people raise money all the time based on personal relationships, past success, etc. I think it'd be more accurate to say that if you could raise money at the idea stage w/ no business & no revenue, you'd already know you can do it & wouldn't have to ask HN how to raise the money.
It's less about asking how to do it because "I just don't know how" and more about asking how others might do it or have done it.
What I have ran into is that reaching out to investors from past startups where I was a dev--they struggle to see me as anything other than a dev (which was 12 years ago, I've had a career since then) and they seem to want social proof. So a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Well if you have >$0 revenue, even if you’re running into the red, if you have some evidence that access to cash is what’s holding the business back from growing, even steadily in a boring niche, it’s usually enough to get your foot in the door.
Most cities have a network of angels. Some times they hold open events or may have a directory of people you could call to see if they’ll hear your pitch. Then there’s venture debt, and debt. With high interest being what it is now may not be a good time for those options. Self funding and bootstrapping is the most self-sufficient way to go if you have the supports for it.
If you can’t get your foot in the door to pitch angels then I’d keep hustling. Present at local developer meetups, network online, meet people who would be willing to put in some part time into a side-gig for equity. Keep building that revenue until you’re profitable on your own and can hire folks on your own or the angels can’t ignore you.