How to get your hands on pre-seed funding

1/ First principle - THE PICK.

Make sure you’ve picked your idea well!

A problem you feel is really worth solving, or an opportunity you’re willing to commit a good chunk of your life to. Validate hard before you commit.

Fact: Too many founders rush into average ideas.

2/ Find a co-founder

It’s harder to get funded solo. It's also lonely.

Whether you can attract one more person is a first, important point of validation. Trustmark #1.

3/ Decide who the leader is and how the equity gets split. Have the hard and honest conversations early. Defeat usually comes from within, so be extremely explicit about all the important stuff. Hoping it will be OK is not a strategy. Be ready to talk to investors about this.

4/ Get great customer insights early - nothing sells investors like demonstrating deep knowledge of the users or customers you are going after.

Get outside of the building and start talking to your clients.

5/ Build a great narrative. Get your company founding mythical story down, develop your pitch, hone your messaging. People back people, but people get behind narratives. This early brand work is invaluable.

6/ Prototype, MVP your product, get feedback.

If you can turn the idea that’s in your head into a prototype people can get excited about, you’re demonstrating product chops. Trustmark #2.

7/ Force yourself to conceptualise your business model well.

You don’t need a forecast — but you do need a fairly sophisticated understanding of how your business will (likely) work. It’s about the mechanics, not the numbers.

Be(come) a business person.

8/ Get people who know you best to part with (some) money to support you. Your ex-boss, an ex-colleague who made money, a mentor. Trustmark #3.

I appreciate many founders will have a cold start on network, but this helps.

9/ Plan like a MoFo. You need to have a running set of evolving documents that track your customer insights, your testing results, your product roadmap, your budget, your competition, your brand and messaging, your recruitment needs, your option budget etc.

10/ Go!

PS1 - Behind the scenes, start your content marketing / building share of voice / getting your profile out there WAY BEFORE you need money. Have a hard plan on building personal brand and presence well before. A topic in its own right.

PS2 - Don’t stop building when you’re raising. I know it’s hard, but funding is usually the outcome of company progress. Too many founders wait for funding to come to make progress. Don’t.

PS3 - Fan out carefully as you approach investors. Other founders are the best source of intros - ask them. Be highly personalised in your approaches.

Process and sourcing investors is a topic for another day.