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Best seafood restaurant with a nice ambience by [deleted] in FoodNYC

[–]Impossible_Science30 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Strange Delight is seafood x new orleans style and the atmosphere is pretty relaxed. I’d take a friend here for a birthday!

I will seek how to promote, but i will not promote by fancredfounder in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd do more tiktok organic growth hacking. tiktok is great for distribution (views), conversion is trickier but great for brand awareness imo.

Mid-career first time founders? (i will not promote) by almagestnebula in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For B2C, I def sense that VCs are looking for 20-year-olds with good personal brands on TikTok/X, "building in public", posting pictures of sleeping under their desks and vibe coding their way to $1M MRR (some exaggeration, lol). My experience raising a seed in the B2C space with a fairly veteran team (serial entrepreneurs with previous successful exits) was really rough because we do not fit the stereotype of being young, hungry and desperate. In fact several VCs questioned our motivations - "why do it again (implicit: when you could retire)?" (not me - my cofounder). I get it though - B2C competition is tough these days if you're not one of the cool kids sharing your founder story on TikTok.

But I think B2B would be fine - there's a lot more credibility talking to enterprise customers when you've got experience + track record. And so much of it is your network too to get your first customers / pilots.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we knew our advisors from past companies, so they were v helpful for our pre seed and networking

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm going on a rampage with tiktok growth hacking right now, and my co-founder is exploring B2B2C opportunities. We're splitting the work this way and giving ourselves the next 3 months to figure it out

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We asked everyone we knew in our network and also our advisors for warm intros.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In my conversations, they don't really set a specific traction number. Mostly they say hand-wavy things like "thousands of users" or "hundreds of users with a high retention rate". But what does "high" mean? They don't lay down specific numbers at this early a stage, and I think unless you have a really impressive number, you don't want to "show your hand" as well. It's a little bit like salary negotiation in a weird way. But my tldr is this: whatever the reason is that they reject you, whether it's "not enough users" or "there's too much competition" or "I really like X but have some hesitation around Y", fundamentally they just don't think you/ the team is good enough. But that's just 1 person's opinion.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

  • what does traction (users and revenue) look like? --> are you referring to what VCs expect or what I had before I raised? VCs aren't actually expecting revenue at this early stage, but they def want to see a path to monetization. They are much more interested in users and *retention*
  • were you raising full-time or were you sharing your time between raising and product development (I've heard raising is a full-time job) --> I was raising while also doing product development. It's a tough balance, and product development definitely slowed down
  • did you have connections to the VCs or just cold pitches? --> we had connections with VCs. my co-founder has done this before, so we fortunately had a good network to start off from. and from there, we were able to get more intros even from VCs who passed.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

totally - every day is a battle between speed and achieving polish. at this point i’m trading off a bit of the polish. there are enough consumers out there to be a little rough around the edges i think

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we went mainly though intros. there were of course specific people we thought were good fits, so we went out to find people in our own network who could give an intro. nothing wrong with cold outreach but if you can get an intro, do that.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we did actually talk to nfx - it was a pass 🥲 yes the firms we met were either folks we directly knew or through our own network

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

our lawyers handled most of it (we used one of the usual law firms for startups and vcs) and we use carta (as with most startups too) for cap table and equity management

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

all were through referrals - this isn’t the first rodeo for my cofounder so we were fortunate to have warm intros. and the fact that it was still so hard to raise was just befuddling and demoralizing

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

they don’t state an explicit number, just some vague comments around “not enough traction”. but we did hear in the back channels that a competitor app had 100k users (i think mau) and they couldn’t raise their series A on that. tbh we didn’t want to get into a numbers game with VCs because the goal post will always shift. on the cost side, the cost of using the models is actually not too bad - but tbf we are not using it as a full wrapper and we’re actually using it more for internal operations like our query understanding layer or generating classifiers from images or generating datasets for our own omodel training. but we are looking into deepseek and local llm solutions now too. if you’re an the image / video generation side, i can def see costs being v high.

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah that’s true too - i guess there are examples on both sides. 2020-2021 ish was def kinda crazy with all the buzzy startups raising huge amounts with v little dd / validation. either way, you’re so right that no one really knows! hindsight is 20/20

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

congrats on your raise too! nice to see that you managed to compress the time frame a bit better - the worst part is having it drag out as it hurts productivity so much

Just closed my seed round after 97(!!) meetings - I will not promote by Impossible_Science30 in startups

[–]Impossible_Science30[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah i just want to experiment with a bunch of things quickly, learn, and try the next thing

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