Secret Sauce to get funded

Over the course of this year, we’ve seen a lot of founders get funded in our community.

The secret sauce?

The ones who got funded had two things in common.

1. Traction (50k ARR+)
2. Warm VC network (a16z, Pear, Tim Draper, etc.)
   Pretty simple right?

If it was, we’d all have 50k ARR and be connected to a16z.

The biggest mistake

Where we’ve seen founders struggle is:

• Fundraising when they don’t have enough traction (eg: 50k ARR)
• Cold emailing VCs when they don’t have a network (they see you as desperate)

Why is this bad

Unless you are an exited founder, fundraising without traction is hard.
A bunch of our founders (Harvard MBAs, Princeton Alums) thought they could fundraise prior to having traction because they had sexy backgrounds. They struggled and ended up actually stopping their fundraise to get traction. Once they got traction, they were able to raise their Preseed/Seed in a snap.
I would say the common mistake I’ve seen is thinking you are ready (eg: my background, my app is cool) prior to having enough traction (eg: 50k ARR).
These founders waste 2000 hours that they could be spending on building traction.

It’s like being Level 10 in pokemon and trying to kill the gym leaders.
You could have been spending that time leveling up your company’s traction to Level 50, then try again then. Or you can keep dying.

What we did instead

So we’ve started to focus our own internal efforts in Founders Cafe to help people get traction (50k ARR+) and get warm intros to top tier VCs (a16z, Pear, etc.).

So now we’ve started to focus on two categories
If you don’t have enough traction to fundraise:

• Getting mentored weekly by someone who has achieved your goal (Eg: 50k ARR) until you hit it

If you already have traction:

• Getting warm intros from founders funded by Top Tier VCs until you raise

I would say these should be some goal posts early on if you want to some day get into YC, or raise millions from a16z. If you don’t have the traction or the network, and have the funds, I would say it would be a good idea to take advantage of this resource.

Best of luck from founderscafe.io !!