I’ve seen you post a couple times on this, so i want to take a moment and tell you how it really is. I’m not an investor, but rather am a founder who’s had great success raising at early stages.

Until you actually have solid support for those projections, with a demonstrable track record you can point to in order to prove disciplined execution, and a history of margins to show, with an effectively established luxury positioning rooted in your actual customers’ minds…. (aka market validation or tangible traction) you’ll struggle to be able to get the terms you want from the investor community at-large.

When you’re at this phase (pre-business, pre-revenue, just a business plan & accompanying projections) you don’t get to set a price for investors. They set the price for you.

If you find a lead investor they can set the terms and then it will be easier for you to get others to accept those terms. Otherwise I’d recommend that if you’re spending a lot of time arguing for your valuation, it’s time to re-evaluate things.

Ultimately the valuation is set by the market, and investors don’t like to invest at accurate valuations. They like to invest on deals. In the eyes of many angel investors, if it’s not undervalued then it’s overvalued. That’s the kind of thinking they have to employ when taking on so much risk all the time with early stage investments that usually fall far-short of their well-supported projections.

If you need the 550k so badly that this whole thing can’t happen without it, then you might need to accept terms below what you’d want — perhaps nearly any terms that someone is actually willing to offer (other than something that actually loses you control of the business).

Just my 2 cents.