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How a Seed VC Approaches Pre-Product Startups

View from Seed

It’s often a good idea for founders to find a way to build something and get some early market validation before raising outside capital. But doing that is sometimes not practical given your personal runway or because the product you want to build requires additional capital very early on. Is there founder/market fit?

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Pitch Deck Month: “Is It Working?” (aka the “Traction” Slide)

View from Seed

Pre-launch customer development data is another way, sometimes in the form of user surveys for consumer companies or interviews with potential beta customers for B2B businesses. One of our portfolio investments, a B2B SaaS company, was a pre-product startup at the time of the seed round. B) Post-Product Companies.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 29: Ajay Kshatriya and Steven Cohn

Steve Blank

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Ajay Kshatriya. Steven : Nope, hubris.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 29: Ajay Kshatriya and Steven Cohn

Steve Blank

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Ajay Kshatriya. Steven : Nope, hubris.

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Building a new startup hub

Startup Lessons Learned

Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities.

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Fund Raising is a Means Not an End

Steve Blank

If you’re a scalable startup, you want to spend small amounts of money (seed capital) as you run experiments testing your hypotheses. In normal times, when there aren’t dollars to undo mistakes, you use Customer Development to find product-market fit. Why small amounts? No startup ever spends less then it raises.

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Fund Raising is a Means Not an End

Steve Blank

If you’re a scalable startup, you want to spend small amounts of money (seed capital) as you run experiments testing your hypotheses. In normal times, when there aren’t dollars to undo mistakes, you use Customer Development to find product-market fit. Why small amounts? No startup ever spends less then it raises.