The Startup Playbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19Prerequisites for Funding

I (Will) didn't have a clue that it was going to take us a full year to get funding for Viewlogic. As founders, we knocked on the doors of every investor we could find, usually getting turned away with negative feedback about the size of the market or the inexperience of the founding team.

Did we panic at times? Hell, yes! In fact, looking back, it's not clear to me why we never gave up. We deeply believed we had a good idea, and we all thought our team was excellent. We also had enough positive feedback from people in the industry to keep us believing that we would eventually get money. Or, maybe that was just naiveté and ignorance. Yeah, come to think if it, it was probably just that.

While all the rejection was painful, it forced us to focus our energy on making sure the business model was as tight as possible. We increased our efforts on talking with potential customers, on identifying our go-to-market strategy, on understanding our development challenges, and on understanding the minimum amount of money we needed to start with.

In the end, the maturity of our plan and the team, as a result of our many iterations of the business model, came through. We found two VCs who backed us in our seed round. They didn't give us much money, and the valuation was very low. Mostly, we didn't care. We had some level of validation of the idea and the team, and we were able to get off and running. It certainly wasn't the easiest or shortest path, but ...