Tired of applying everywhere for funding.

I completely get your frustration, having been through this cycle myself while building. And yes it's true, it's hard to raise funding in this market, but you'd have to probably go more focused on your approach. A few suggestions from my end to maybe make the fundraising meaningful. 1. Customers: Ask yourself if what you're building is a priority item or simply a challenge in the industry? You have no idea how many folks get to these much later on in the journey. What I mean by that is, will what you are building be a priority item for your ICP maybe because it impacts their bottom-line or drives higher efficiency, anything that contributes to revenue. If not, if you're only solving for a challenge, do your research whether this is what your customers are looking at at the moment? 2. Focusing on Closed Sales- Instead of closing sales given you're still building your MVP, get your solution validated. Get your target customers to give you nuggets on why you're needed. It's great to get a LOI if you're in the B2B business, because that's the amount of contract value your funding will help you hit and VCs would prefer a more active pipeline than something that's purely on ideation.Also gives you the right thesis on your product, the pricing, any misses etc. 3. Team: While I get why many people say hire from Tier 1, Tier 1 always doesn't equal more quality for you. Find folks who have on the ground operator experience in your domain, get them to validate your idea and sell your vision. Ask them to get involved in part time activity. Offer them healthy ownership, find advisors many folks including me do free advisory for ventures because it's a way to give back to folks where you feel they are solving something critical. So get crafty to get a more holistic founding team 4. Angel Investors: Investment like anything else works on sales like lifecycle. You have to be concise with the investors you approach, find out investors who represent your domain or have invested

Hi @Catshowl can totally understand this. If possible, can you share a brief about your team and the idea that you're building upon? I could help in sharing a few notes on how we approach first calls (I work at a T1 fund)

How will funding help you?

If your product is good/doable you wont need vC funding... VC funding should be opted only scaling up. Any one who comes for funding at idea stage is just another scam.

I don’t use linkedin so I can’t get funding?

your startup is of which sector?

@Catshowl @MetalMan20 @WittyFeed I can totally relate to it. I'll share my experience. Building a SaaS and raising our first cheque. Some stats, - Team of 3 (no tier 1 or 2 grads, all tier 3, my 2nd startup, CTO is a decorated person, CMO is a dropout) - Traction: 250 members on waitlist, $0 spent on marketing, waitlist growing 40% week on week. - MVP under development (planned to release for the first 1000 waitlist members) - 100+ one on one user interviews with Target audience. Fundraising stats - Opened the pre-seed round on June 1. - Using the fundraising OS for documenting. - Got 20+ 1st meetings, 6+ 2nd meetings, totally 75+ angels and VCs approached so far. 28 outright rejections. We did a killer pitch deck and I wrote an investment memo which alone is converting into meetings (this is not to brag but the quality of memo and deck is top notch) Some common feedback from VCs - Memo is too good (we are encouraging our portfolio founders to write this) - Deck is well made. Keep up the good work. - We are convinced of the market and team. Idea is convincing but position it differently. I planned to close the round by today (June 30). But didn't land a single term sheet yet. I don't know what mistake we are making. Is it my lack of ability to close deals (first fundraising exp.) or investors particularly invest based on strong background. Also we are stuck in a chicken & egg problem, everyone who gave a meeting wants someone else to lead for them to co-lead. No one wants to take the first leap. Getting the first YES is quite challenging. We need the fund for accelerating the product development. (Team + Tech infra) Funding is really stressing me out and slowing our product development (I handle products). Rejections don't hurt, everything is just feedback. I want to know where we are going wrong, so that we can reiterate. Any referrals/warm intros/suggestions is welcome. We can connect on telegram.

Follow Prateek Sanjay (based in Norway) on LinkedIn and read his posts and methodology of approaching investors. Try speaking to him for advice, he's pretty helpful and active online.

Try crowd funding

Any tier 1 grad in the team?