How to find seed stage startups?
I want to find seed stage startups to join as a founding engineer. I want to take some risk while I can and try if I can get a good return.
How should I go about this?
I have 7 years of experience. Building distributed systems, backend services with Go, Clojure, etc. I have some frontend experience as well with SvelteKit, Tailwind, etc. I also made a SaaS product recently and got around 10 small businesses as customers on subscription. The product itself got acquired for 5 figures USD after I ran it for 2 months
Take a free subscription of crunchbase. Find startups funded in the last 2 years by good funds and cancel subscription. The founders are generally easy to cold call
This is the worst way to find startups sorry piggybacking on your comments
A lot of seed stage startups are not on crunch base and the ones there are probably also the ones to avoid.
Best way to find a startup find a area that you find interesting and follow all developments and news. Lets say fintech. If you went to Crunchbase you would not know that Flipkart is building a credit startup within itself and is hiring for it. However if you were following e-commerce or fintech you would have read Prakash Sikaria left to start then you follow them on linked in. Similarly, Dale Vaz from Swiggy quit and is launching a trading startup.
Both of these are imo the best founding team opportunities I am aware of both but you won’t find on Crunchbase, or by them time you do it will be too late.
Si
If you rely on crunchbase to get startup jobs at seed stage you will be stuck in companies that you should avoid.
Yeah cool
Can you please tell us about your own startup
It's a customer support chatbot platform built with LLM. A business owner signs up, creates a bot by providing links to their business website/docs etc and they get a bot which can answer all questions related to the business.
They'd also get a snippet which can be pasted into their landing page for example to add a support chat bubble.
Along with that it had history, some analytics, customisation of appearance, etc. Based on the message and training limit, there were 4 subscription tiers.
I got around 10 users across 19 and 49 USD / month plans. But I got bored and also i don't have any marketing experience or an existing distribution channel. So I listed on microns.io -- got a good offer and sold it.
Thanks a lot man, really appreciate this.
Wellfound (formally angellist) has helped me a lot. You get to chat with the recruiter who is usually the founder for small startups. The platform also shows transparent salary range and ESOPS.
YC Jobs is also a great way to know about recently funded companies, gives you sector wise filters too.
Peersignal is good for B2B SAAS discovery. It's like a excel sheet to filter your choices in any way possible.
All VC funds wants to ride the wave early. Look at portfolios of VC funds like Sequoia, Blume, Lightspeed, Elevation. There are also company funds portfolio like Flipkart, Razorpay, Rainmatter Group. Startups backed by these are heavily researched backed on thesis and market competition although it's a 1:100 success ratio, these are the ones who create buzz in the market.
Join an Angel investing community (Mumbai angels, IPV etc) and you will be able to get all the info related to their capital allocation and runways.
Only join seed stage if you want to open someday yours. 99% of them failed and make no real value just burn money. They are heavy intuition backed and not data driven. Other companies are stable, structured and WLB :)
These companies could just go for pivots and pivots, over working hours, layoffs on their own over hire mistakes.
Y Combinator, incubators like Antler, track seed stage investment funds(they keep doing press releases for their investments) and reporting websites like entrakr.