For early-stage pre-seed cos, how should we split our time between building product, acquiring users, and raising money?
Q: If my co-founder and I are an early-stage pre-seed co, how should our time be split between building our product, acquiring users, and raising money? It feels like a lot at once…
It IS a lot at once! This is why being a founder is overwhelming... there's a lot to do, and it all seems urgent and time-sensitive.
Unfortunately, there's no great answer other than to prioritize two things:
- what needs to be de-risked the most right this moment and
- what the biggest bottleneck is at this exact moment
For most super-early startups, the biggest risk is not finding product/market fit. The biggest bottleneck is not having enough customers.
That's why many startups will focus on customer discovery and customer development before fundraising or acquiring customers. The goal here is to deeply understand the problem(s) your customers have, and to determine if you can come up with a differentiated solution to solve that problem.
At this stage, you may not even need to build out a product yet. I highly recommend reading The Mom Test to learn how to validate your business ideas.
If you’re building a deep tech idea, then your biggest risk is not proving out demand, but proving that your tech works at a prototype stage.
Once you have some semblance of proof of this, your priorities may shift and you should focus on something else instead – like pre-selling your product to enterprise clients so that you can fundraise.
