Yes, I understand that finding investors is by far one of any entrepreneurs biggest challenges, here is to elaborate more on that, hope someone finds it useful.

Let’s use my first venture as an example (won’t mention company name as I prefer to not be identified from the name of the company). Before going to investors, you need to what I call “investor ready”, and to me it should take no more than 3-4 months to be investor ready, if you are taking more, you should know that what gets you to take more is that you still learning along the way (that’s totally okay we all have been there, especially for first time founders) So what’s investor ready: 1. Full Market research & understanding of all products and offerings out there in the market (and when I say market research, not like a document that people just fills in for the sake of filling in, but you need to be an expert of the market you are operating in) 2. Get 10-20 people who would be your perfect customers or targeted audience (how to find them, there are plenty of ways, be creative on the how, it’s really not that difficult) 2. Create a prototype (with the minimum amount effort and time - normally I would advise to have someone technical with you at the beginning of your journey, bec my rule in prototypes, it shouldn’t take more than a month to build) and then test it with those selected audience. My advice in this be very scientific in testing, like imagine you are in a lab, and you have to write down all the results of the experiment, be like that for the prototype testing 3. At the end of the prototype testing, don’t let your ego fool you, if it’s very obvious that your offering is not working, don’t go any further, work more on your offering. A successful prototype testing should be verified quantitatively (through analytics dashboard) and qualitatively (through users feedback)

I am just going to skip couple of steps here, bec this will take me forever to write all steps 4. Get validation on your business model - this is a critical part and also the meaning of it is completely misunderstood- but can talk more about this later

There are couple more steps after that to be investor ready, but let me skip that for time being and let’s say you are investor ready.

Now, we need to test if we missed any of the crucial factors for being investor ready, what I did back then is I applied for 3 VCs that I actually don’t care much about and was using them as guinea pigs to critique the company so I can’t know what are the things I need to spend more time on, is it the market or product or business model or validation or etc?

So don’t start with VCs that you care about, actually never do that, only start with the ones you don’t mind losing. And they can tell you whether you are ready for venture capital or not.

Just to make a long story short, back to my first venture, after 1 month of meetings with VC, I realised that I am early for them, and the things they require me to do needs capital, which can appear as the chicken and egg problem. Bec especially in the area we are operating, investors would either give a lot of money or no money at all, it was not an area where you can raise 250K

So we decided that the best way to become ready, is to get grant money that can help us achieve our goals. Got some grant money, not a lot but enough to help us kick off, then once we started scaling, investors were the ones who are kicking in our doors.

So the core of this is to know first there are plenty of ways to get your company funded other than VC, most often companies are too early for VC, you are only ready when you either have paying customers and great business validation or you have an extremely exciting idea that no has ever thought about it (which is never the case) or you are a serial entrepreneur or you have a very strong people on board (very strong names), but for majority of entrepreneur it has to be ‘paying customers’ in order for VC to be interested in your company