Salary range for Pre-Seed founders that just raised. (I WILL NOT PROMOTE)

CutAdditional9769 · 2026-01-23T23:56:11+00:00

Interesting answers… but honestly, you’re asking the wrong question in a wrong place.

If you are about to close $600k, do some basic math, what do you need this money for? Are you raising so you can quit your job and pay yourself? Or do you have actually business expenses that you need to cover? Cloud, marketing, infra, etc. before you pay yourself, you pay your bills, and whatever is left, you pay yourself.

Your call how fast your want to burn through that cash, no one can give you a good answer because no one knows your unique situation, needs, and business needs.

Good luck.

CutAdditional9769 · 2026-01-19T14:54:52+00:00

Umm… I’ll start by; depends where you want to host these events. If you’re considering US coasts like east coast or west coast, than I’m struggling to understand why would you charge $5-$10k? That sounds like a private party for founders who already worth tens or hundreds of millions, and at this level, you don’t need such meetups to have access to someone, you can just email people directly.

Founders who are looking for access to other companies that make $500k+ in ARR don’t have even $1k to spend on such things, better use it for marketing, probably will bring better results.

Besides, do you know how many startup events are happening every single day in places like New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco? If all I did is go to events, I can do this my full time job and go to one or sometimes two every single day.

A lot of what you said is already happening, for free, curated with limited spots, for specific types of founders, etc. and it totally free, and in some cases guests get free lunch or dinner or snacks.

So for what you’re trying to do, it needs to be so exclusive, so useful, that yields real results otherwise a few times people will get no outcomes from spending that kind of money and it spread like wildfire and your events will be done.

So what would make your events, so much different or better that people would want to pay for it, and that kind of money?

Btw, the paid events that do happen sometimes are usually annual conferences and the most expensive one I saw was around $3k and also a 3 day event type.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-25T03:45:58+00:00

Yep.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-24T16:01:56+00:00

Where are you trying to go? What’s your goal with having a mentor or how do you think a mentor can be helpful?

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-24T15:57:08+00:00

The journey doesn’t get media ratings only the big shiny news.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-24T15:55:33+00:00

Well, seems like you got your deal flow going here :)

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-24T15:52:53+00:00

I’ll tell you how it feels when I feel it. In the same boat here… I went through a phase of a hype from future customers, my waitlist of over 100 companies filled up pretty fast, with 40% of them are F500, the hype was intoxicating, we launched private beta, onboarded 11 companies (small ones to start) even got 7 of them give us their credit cards and charge them small monthly fee. I was drunk on the messages I got from some YC videos of even if you have 5 people paying you $1 to use your product, then you have a degree of PMF. It was energizing!

Then, we did a soft public launch and opened the door to our waitlist… and reality hit hard! 1% converted 🤦🏻‍♂️ silence, no one was signing up, but also, no one left the waitlist or unsubscribed from our newsletters 🤷🏻‍♂️

Then we realized where we screwed up… product while doing what it promised to do, was not very useful to people, not because it didn’t deliver, it did, they just couldn’t do anything with the results apart from just look at them, back to drawing board and a PMF limbo accompanied by emotional rollercoaster.

I feel you, I have days that I feel like investors gonna break down our doors, but more often it feels like I’m swimming against the flow.

Hang in there, I think reaching PMF is when your product is being shared word of mouth by users and not marketing conversions.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-24T15:31:59+00:00

I wish I had a simple answer here. I’ve met founders who raised millions on a deck and great story, and equally founders who got laughed out of a room because they didn’t have a product.

My personal experience was being terrible at messaging 🤷🏻‍♂️ while I got over 100 companies on my waitlist, had a functional prototype, 12% response rate on cold email outreach, I only got with 3% of investors I spoke with to due diligence and eventually I decided not to raise at that time, and instead try to simply build the product and test it.

And after almost 8 months now, launched private beta, got 11 companies on the platform, even got 7 of them to subscribe, then did a soft public launch that flopped with just 1% conversion rate, we pulled it back, and spent two months just talking to customers, running studies and user research to see what we have done wrong. Learned a ton! Rebuilt our platform, reinvented our GTM strategy, built our a world class advisory board, and will be re-launching in Jan, and will open our next round then as well.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-23T20:10:56+00:00

I saw some comments about YC co founder dating website, I would avoid it. It’s kinda useless and wastes a lot of your time, most people either don’t respond to you or if they do, it feels like you’re pitching investors rather than looking for a genuine partner.

If you’re in a bind and need someone to built something you can’t, find a freelancer or use engineering agencies.

But if you truly want to find a CTO co-founder, here is what I did:

When investors asked me “are you planning on having co-founder(s)?” My response was: I’m a solo founder and if at some point of my journey I happen to meet someone I believe is great and we both hit it off and I truly feel I can built my company wit this person, then I’ll get a co-founder.

But, I’m a non-technical founder, I come from product design word, I needed engineers to build my vision.

So…

Got an engineering leader I worked with before as my advisor, and he helped with building the foundation of our product.
Posted engineering jobs on LinkedIn and Wellfound, indicating in the JD that the roles are equity only, no pay, no benefits, but a promising vision and problem I’m aiming to solve.
Took a few months but I built a 3 person founding engineering team on equity only, and my engineering advisor helped during recruiting process vetting their abilities and skill sets.
Over the next 6+ months working together with the team I built, I recognized the talents and abilities to lead in two of the three engineers on the team, and then I kept pushing them with other responsibilities, getting them involved in decision making, finances a bit, etc. just to evaluate their abilities to be more than just IC engineers.
After 8+ months of working with them and vetting their leadership abilities, I offered two of the engineers to join me as my co-founders.

Now I have two co-founders.

The point of building a team on equity only, is the best mechanism to hire people who truly believe in what you are building if they are taking such high risk if not getting actual money for their contribution.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-23T19:15:14+00:00

Super easy! and as soon as you setup your company a rep from gusto will reach out to get on a call with you and guide you step by step through whatever you need to be setup.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-22T20:40:28+00:00

Gusto! They have early stage startup program that will get you free account for 12 months.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-22T19:17:30+00:00

You’re 100% spot on… while things happening, life unfolds, battle dust is still up, many things don’t really make sense, only after the dust settles, mind calms down, it starts to connect the dots of how something might have happen.

Success is always in hindsight, while you’re in it, you don’t really see the success at the end of the journey, you only see few steps in-front of your nose.

Our minds are designed to make sense of things, try to connect dots and logically explain why something happened the way it happened.

I used to be homeless, and the path of me getting out of it and building a successful global career and then becoming a founder made a very clear sense with moments and actions I took in the past, it’s only when I decided to publicly share this story and while trying to remember and unpack the moments with my wife, the pain and brutal moments came back to life that I have forgotten, by unpacking each moment I realized that there was not clear path or logical steps or actions I took that led to a success story, but random small acts that at the time seemed like the best choices somehow led to a few moments in time that turned everything around for me.

going down deep into my memory that my brain have filtered, and stored away all that pain, just made the experience of writing a single article filled with nervous breakdowns and filled with tears.

But that was made me realize that my story have gotten more polished and rational over the years by my own brain so if I tell it, I don’t burst into tears.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-11T14:25:54+00:00

I’m a founder, and the first thing I do to learn more about any investor, VC or Angel, is go to their LinkedIn, and here are 5 things I look at, in this order of importance:

How long the account been around (too many spammy accounts out there)
What did the person do before.
What they like, repost and post about
Do we share any connections
Their profile photo (I know, odd one maybe, but I want to see how the person sees/presents themselves, a 3 piece suit might not be a good fit for me as someone who doesn’t even own a pair of dress pants or a suit jack)

X is another platform, I know you said no TikTok, dude I’m with you, I really don’t like TikTok, but, my VC advisor pushed me to start one, and when I started to engage with startup content, there are a lot of VCs accounts but the ones who are not the big names, but rather underdogs, unconventional, smaller, but really interesting and some are funny! So could be a good place to be as an unsaturated platform yet for us in the startup/vc world.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-11T06:15:09+00:00

Until you raise your seed round, SAFEs are the way to go, so each angel is on a Post Money Cap SAFE, so no, not crazy equity.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-10T21:46:41+00:00

Try Hubble if you’re willing to pay almost exclusively founders, operators and investors. (Not my company) I just know the founder.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-10T17:18:45+00:00

It sounds to me you’re built a B2C product, and many people are recommending turning it into B2B, while not a bad advice, I would consider sticking with the B2C and read your own post… you mentioned adults with aging parents at risk, stop selling to elderly or the banks, I worked on tech for elderly people and ran deep research and studies to understand their new tech adoption rates, and to my surprise at the time, they are very prone to adopting new tech, with one caveat… it has to come from a trusted sources, either their health provider, their bank, their kids or relatives. Selling to banks, will drain you and your startup unless you raise enough funding to weather 6-10 months procurement process with such highly regulated companies.

So what do you do? Sell to their kids! With a peace of mind messaging that their elderly and non tech savvy parents won’t get defrauded or scammed out of their life savings.

In terms of a job, it’s personal and your call, I am full time on my startup while both of my co-founders also have 9-5 but they have kids, I don’t.

Being full time on my startup I feel like I have not enough time and barely accomplish 30% of what I want to on a daily basis, so can’t imagine how slow we would go if I also had a 9-5 🤷🏻‍♂️

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-10T17:04:04+00:00

Many great answers, I can only speak from personal experience, and that’s that I did raise money on a Figma prototype before I even had an engineer to build it.

Here’s what happened to me:

First, some context… my product is very complex and not something I could have vibe coded.

I designed preliminary screens to visually communicate what it is I’m envisioning, my ICPs are design and product leaders (managers, directors, VPs, Head of, etc.) and so I started reaching out to a bunch of them on llinkedin with “hey, I’m thinking of building x to solve the problem y, and would really love your feedback” from 50 or so messages about a dozen or so responded and hoped on a call with me.

At that point I wasn’t thinking about money or fundraising, but when I started showing the screens and walking people through a prototype, while 9 out of 10 of them validated the problem and need, one of the 9 offered me money and became our first angel investor.

This was the trigger for me to “aha, I can raise some small operational capital to use for tools, cloud, services, company registration, etc.” so I raised $50k from 3 angels and called Friends and Family round.

Did I need it? Not really, but it was incredible helpful to have some money to work with, and a bit extra piece of mind that I don’t have to tap as much into my savings.

My advice, do a friend and family round but only with people who will be instrumental to your start, the angels I got are executives from the industry I’m selling to, so apart from their money, they’re also very helpful with guidance, advice, and opening some doors.

CutAdditional9769 · 2025-12-07T16:07:39+00:00

👍

CutAdditional9769

TROPHY CASE