Thinkpilot's Journey to Pre-Seed

We are Thinkpilot and this is the story of our origin

Fundraising for a startup is a challenging journey on its own, filled with highs and lows -  and I want to share our story with you. Whether you're a product creator, an investor, a startup enthusiast, or one of our greatest supporters - our friends and family, there's something here for everyone.‍

Our story here will take you through ideation, working out how to launch your start-up, preparing to meet potential investors, meeting those investors, what went wrong, what went right, and what we learnt. Here at Thinkpilot, we believe in total transparency as a way to learn, grow, and collaborate. What you get below is therefore a very honest account of the journey so far.

For startup enthusiasts, this provides a deep dive into the fundraising process at the pre-seed stage, offering a personal account filled with real examples.

For product creators, I want to inspire you and highlight the critical role you play in any business endeavor. I also want to show you how we communicated our ideas to investors.

For investors, I offer a transparent look at the fundraising game from the perspective of the other side. Through this experience, my respect for what you do has deepened immensely!

For my friends and family, this story will explain why I've been so busy over the past few months. You'll see that while luck plays a part, there's a lot of hard work and strategy involved.

But before I get into the detail, let me introduce myself by telling you a little story about how my years in chess competitions paid off...

Chess Player to Startup Founder

Chess was a big part of my teenage life. Of course, chess requires strategy - problem-solving and knowing the long view of every move. However, there’s even more to it than that. It’s shaped who I am as a colleague, leader, and now even a startup founder.

When I was 16, I took part in the Bulgarian Chess Championships. I was captain of my 5-person team - that’s me (no.1), players 2, 3, 4, and our reserve. In these competitions, you go up against another team. It’s standard to put your no.1 player against their no.1 player on, unsurprisingly, ‘table 1’; no.2 against no.2, and so on. But throughout the competition, you can also make tactical moves and swap players around. Of course, my ambition was high and I wanted to beat the other top player.

But, my coach told me I’d have to swap. We’d put our reserve onto table no.1, and I’d go to table no.2. Why? And what would happen to my (potential) glorious win? Well, it came down to teamwork. By probably throwing the win on table no.1, which was less likely, but almost certainly taking the win on table no.2, our team would gain enough points to win the competition. And we did. We got gold medals, but also a lesson in humility, putting the team first, and never losing sight of the real goal, even if strategy has to be re-designed.

How Thinkpilot started...

Back to more recent history, I’ll tell you how our idea started and grew.

I won’t dive into the specifics of our idea here, because it’s not the point of this story. In fact, the idea itself isn't what truly matters during pre-seed. My advice, which can be painful to take: Don't fall in love with your ideas. At such an early stage, investors bet on teams. Even though chess is a very individual sport, the championships taught me that the team is what counts - and at Thinkpilot we’ve got an outstanding one. Between us, we hold top professional track records in Machine Learning, Software Development, Product Design, Sales, Branding, Marketing, Law, Leadership… and more. Get the right players in the game and be prepared to rework your idea as you learn. ‍

Our story begins in September 2023 during a casual meeting. Two friends and I, drinking coffee, were talking about building a company around an idea that I literally dreamt of two months earlier. One of them is now my co-founder, but we’ll keep names undisclosed as we prepare to exit stealth mode.

We were discussing the best way to build a company and, given our ambitions, thought that fundraising was our best option. We didn't want to juggle our regular jobs with this business as a side hustle. We considered ourselves strong professionals and felt we were past the age of late-night work while pretending to be motivated at our day jobs. (Ironically, it's well past 1:30 AM as I write this!) We wanted to be dedicated to whatever we chose to do.

When we finished our discussion, I realized something, "Guys, do you realize that we need to come up with something that can turn into a unicorn? Or at least we have to believe so." When they asked why, I explained that any VC company, at least in Europe, is looking for deals that can pay out the sum of the total fund. Given that these funds range between 70 and 130 million, and say they exit at 10% equity, that 10% needs to equal somewhere between 70 million and 130 million. This means that founders need to sell ideas that promise to turn into billion-dollar companies, at the very least.

How were we going to reach such an ambitious promise?

Step 1: Ideation - The Game Plan from a Product/Growth Specialist

As a professional product manager with a strong commercial background, I might approach building a business idea differently from others.

(It's interesting to note that product management is a relatively new profession. It was quite new back in 2015, and only recently did I learn of it being included in some university programs. This makes me wonder when we'll see a generation of startups founded by professional product managers.)

So, instead of starting our fundraising journey by writing an amount we wanted to raise on a board (hopefully nobody does that!), my first step was to justify the project to myself and my co-founders. Given our professional backgrounds and the fact that we were all well-paid, money wasn’t an immediate need. What we sought was a proof of concept to ensure that this journey, once undertaken, would be worth it. A sexy-sounding product idea alone can't describe the entire journey ahead.

As a product manager, I knew there was a right and wrong way to proceed. The wrong way was to rush straight into realizing the shiny product idea I had in mind. The right way was to stand back, let go of the idea temporarily, and focus on who might want to buy it. This was our very first step: understanding our potential buyers and then reflecting on whether we would like to spend the next six years or more serving them. Starting with an internal commitment to who we'd like to work for simply makes a ton of sense. When you are at the top of a business as a founder your only boss is your customer. I’ll echo many others by repeating the popular startup advice, "Listen to your users", but with an added thought: "Make sure you love your users so that your ears can listen."

The plan then became obvious:

Inception

Talk to as many people from our unknown nodebuying persona as possible.

Try to understand their problems.

Understand the competitive landscape and what others offer to this buying persona. Direct competitors or not, it doesn't matter. Product specialists are well aware that customers have budgets, and your product has to fit within that budget next to the rest of the stack. Therefore our mindset is that we compete with any tool that tries to fit in that budget.

Define Our Company Purpose (Business Philosophy)

Develop our Vision, Mission, and set our initial goals (no matter the stage, everyone working on a business project should have at least vision and goals).

Look for Gaps in the Market

Identify areas where the current solutions fall short and where opportunities exist.

Ideate a Product with as Much Information on the Table as Possible

Evaluate how the product idea fits into the business puzzle. In our case, it didn't fit well, and voila, we had our first pivot - luckily before spending any resources on building it.

What did we learn?

The product ideation process itself is truly creative, and I do love it. However, over time, I developed a different passion, not so much for ideating solutions - engineers can often do this better - but for pitching the problem to the engineering team. It requires a particular skill to express a problem and how painful it is; showing how it hurts the user and why it is so important to resolve it. It turns out that specializing in talking about problems is more valuable than talking about solutions. And that doesn’t mean that my ideas born under the shower are not great, it’s just that they often contribute less than focusing on the problem does.

Step 2: Preparing the Business Plan

We considered two ways to approach the business plan: preparing one for investors, and preparing one not for investors (bootstrapping) and we did both.

Preparing an Investor-Ready Business Plan

Having a complete product idea has nothing to do with an investor-ready business plan. My marketing and growth experience allowed us to advance significantly and polish the business plan from both growth and product ideation perspectives.

We spent a lot of effort carefully aligning our company vision and mission with the actual product vision and values. We worked tirelessly to clarify what was essential for our product—its core value—and what was merely nice to have. This experience was quite an ideation challenge, and if it weren't for my technical co-founders, I would still doubt that today's technology is capable of powering up the solution we had in mind. Prototyping and ensuring we could somehow demonstrate to others the product's capability and, more importantly, how it solves the problems was incredibly time-consuming.

However, it isn't only about product and growth. While it's extremely helpful to have a strong vision for both, as it creates a strong impression during talks with investors, there's much more to it. What does our 18-month milestone look like? In terms of product, revenue, and even brand? After answering those we had to prepare the numbers and projections. How much money did we need?

To clarify, because I just used the word “brand”, there is a strong misunderstanding around what brand means. When people hear "brand," they think Tesla, BMW, Mailchimp, Apple etc. But when a marketing professional says "brand," they (hopefully) think of two concepts: brand awareness and brand perception. Brand awareness is related to the amount of people who know about you, and brand perception is how those people see you. Even if only ten people know about you, they perceive you in a certain way. Even at this early stage, we spend time thinking of how those ten people will see us. No matter the count, we have an image to build and we want to make a positive impression from day one.

Preparing the business plan involved several key steps that I explained earlier but are worth stressing again:

Market Research and Validation:

Identify your target market and understand their needs and pain points.

Conduct thorough market research to validate the demand for your product.

Analyze competitors and identify gaps in the market that your product can fill.

Defining the Business Model:

Clearly define how your business will make money.

Identify your revenue streams, cost structure, and key partnerships.

Team and Milestones:

Outline the key team members and their roles.

Define and best write down the milestones you aim to achieve within the funding period.

Balance your ambition with the cost to achieve it. The thing here is that the pre-seed is your most expensive round. Compared to any other round, you give company shares for the lowest return.

Financial Projections:

Create detailed financial projections for the next 18 months. (18 months for us felt like a huge runway but around the minimum time desired by most investors. Again, the purpose of this round was to hit product-market fit, and we were confident that eight months is enough time to do it. The rest of the time would allow for ‘trying again’ and pivoting should we need it.)

Estimate your costs, revenue, and cash flow. (Revenue doesn’t really matter from a business perspective. You shouldn’t add the revenue to the model. Rather imagine that you make 0 revenue for the 18 months. The potential revenue served to predict the size of the customer base and therefore a potential evaluation.)

In the end, a good Excel sheet will determine how much total funding you need to reach your milestone.

As soon as you or you and your founders imagine your first milestone, well, think about it again the next day! Jokes aside, it took us around a week to polish our milestone into a single statement. And that's after all the preparation I mentioned previously. But as soon as we were ready with it, we could think of the team setup and resources that would allow us to get there. It's an interesting game. The milestone represents your goal - to reach it you need money that you don't have and you have to pay for that with company shares. This is the first balancing game we felt: how much of our idea we were willing to let go of in return for getting to our first milestone quickly. Answering this question and figuring out how the right team looks is crucial. Only after that could we start budgeting the expenses for the next 18 months.

As we prepared our business plan, we realized it was closely tied to our pitch. A well-prepared business plan not only guides the company but also forms the backbone of the pitch to investors.

I hope you keep following, soon you’ll learn how we crafted our pitch and the lessons learned from it. But first…

Preparing an Investors-Skipping Business Plan (Bootstrap)

Having a Plan B is just as critical as having a Plan A. This is crucial to prevent any scenarios where momentum can be lost. Getting rejected is painful and can damage your motivation and general team spirit. But having a plan in place when that happens can turn the rejection into a reason to push on.

On top of our desire to have options, we also aim to reuse as much of our output as possible. As soon as you start a company, you enter the business of limited resources and unlimited desires.

With the above in mind, after drafting our investor-ready business plan, we realized that it wouldn't be too much of a hassle to reuse everything we had so far and see how it fits under the idea to bootstrap our way to an MVP.

We recognized that many elements from our investor-ready business plan were also relevant for a bootstrap business model. Points 1 and 2 remained completely intact:

Market Research and Validation:

Understanding the target market and its pain points remains crucial, no matter if you seek investment or want to bootstrap.

Conducting thorough market research to validate the demand for the product is essential in both scenarios.

Analyzing competitors and identifying market gaps that the product can fill ensures that the offering stands out.

Defining the Business Model:

Clearly defining how the business will make money is just as important when bootstrapping.

Identifying revenue streams, cost structures, and key partnerships helps streamline operations and optimize resources.

Team and Milestones:
For us, the team was set to the founders. We didn't have a huge amount of cash under the mattress and had to make it work under a low-fund regime, mainly relying on our personal time as the main input.

We evaluated what we had and decided to move the milestone much closer—actually, as close as possible while still achieving a meaningful result that could grab investors' attention. For us, that meant getting some traction and a few paying customers. We set our milestone at three months post-MVP launch, giving ourselves two months to get initial traction. Hopefully, we will make sales even before the launch.

We also considered potential outsourcing partners to handle the heavy lifting. The idea was to provide the plan and the features, while the execution happened outside. However, we later discontinued this approach after a very insightful conversation with an angel investor, which I'll tell you about shortly.

Financial Projections:

When bootstrapping, you simply scrape together as much money as the founders can contribute and ensure it is very well distributed to give the maximum impact.

My advice: leave some cash for marketing. The MVP won't land in your customer's hands on its own. Cold sales and hardcore hustle are ideal, but if you can do some traditional marketing, go for it. Getting a feel for how easily people engage with the trial or make a purchase gives a great indication. Typically, my experience shows that with a good product, marketing isn't hard.

You should always have alternative paths to get to what you want. There is no time to get upset over rejections or failures. If at any point you think that running and getting a business off the ground is bound only by wins, you’d be wrong. In our team, we know it's not about winning; it's about what you do when you take a loss. And this bootstrap plan was our answer to that question.

Step 3: Understanding Investors

The Investor Friend

You know how important your friends are during the whole journey. Even just listening to your crazy ideas and giving you their support can make a world of difference. Here, I want to touch on one particular friend who played a critical role in our journey. When we started fundraising, we had one investor friend. Today there are even two. And trust me, they are an extremely valuable asset! They don’t know it yet but we are soon going to flood them with t-shirts and hoodies.

I now strongly believe that anyone entering the fundraising game for the first time should start by getting to know an angel investor or a partner in a VC company. Building a strong relationship with this person is invaluable. I can’t tell you exactly how you can do that, but people rarely reject free lunch and drinks! That would be money well spent, trust me.

But why would you need an investor friend? It’s all about the shortcuts! Fundraising isn’t straightforward. The human element adds complexity. An investor friend can play a critical role here. As long as they like you, they can help you learn the game much faster. I feel like my friend saved me a minimum of 2 to 3 months in the whole process. That much time could easily be the difference between failure and success. My friend helped me avoid many mistakes, polish my pitch, and define my role.

The more help you get from your investor friend, the stronger your relationship becomes, and so does the level of support they are willing to offer. At some point, they might even start making introductions for you and help you prepare your pitch deck. Investors are better connected, have opinions (you need a different perspective), and share a sense of the situation in different markets. If one investor sees a market in a particular way, chances are that others you talk to will see it the same way - though that’s not a rule.

So, spend time with your investor friend, study them, and try to understand what’s important to them and what doesn’t matter. This will prepare you for the next step in the journey: Choosing the profile of your investor partners!

Preparing a Profile of Your Dream Investment Partner

I think there’s plenty written on this topic. For us, the strategy was quite simple: try to get to the best investors within our ecosystem. It’s an ongoing part of our story. Here’s how we went about it so far:

We started by looking for an angel investor. Even though you can focus solely on VC companies, I wouldn’t skip talking to angels. I mean, who wouldn't want to have an angel by their side? For us, the question was what kind of angel. We wanted people with expertise in what we wanted to build and people who, potentially, could be our customers today or could have been in some earlier stage of their careers.

And then the VC companies. I can’t tell you a bulletproof approach to identifying who is right for you within your ecosystem. The one thing that matters the most is to make sure what stage they invest in so you don’t lose too much time on VCs that aren’t ready to commit at your stage. Spending a little time with such VCs is healthy - once again, for gathering perspectives, but don’t get too excited as a rejection is the likely outcome if you are not at the stage where they typically enter. You might also check their portfolio and the companies they have invested in, but I don't buy that too much. I don’t get impressed when they tell me they invested in great companies. This doesn't tell me anything about how they helped those companies become so successful, and that's what really matters for a startup. So as long as they invested in pre-seed, we wanted to talk to them and build our own impressions. Also, you can reach out to founders who got funding from them, but given everyone’s busy life, it can take time until you get your reply. Anyhow, I read that somewhere so it probably works.

Another thing to consider is their involvement. You might prefer investors who give you the money and step aside or those who’ll work closely with you to realize your idea. I think in most cases, the same VC company is open to both collaboration styles. But if you can evaluate that before the call and conclude that they aren’t working in the style you like, well, move on.

Step 4: Developing the Pitch

The pitch was where we struggled the most. I consider myself a great storyteller, and during my marketing years, I was convinced that storytelling is the strongest marketing weapon. You can’t imagine the blow I took when I realized that I couldn’t tell our story right, and investors didn’t fully grasp or buy it. Disaster, right? But the problem wasn’t in my lack of storytelling skills; the problem was that I didn’t understand the audience. I had no clue what investors wanted and expected from an idea. So I was unable to tell the story properly. Now, you probably read the part about the investor friend a few minutes ago, but this highlights yet again the need for such a person. Over time, he helped me close that gap, and I could move on to prepare the very first pitch behind Thinkpilot, encapsulated in a bunch of slides that people call the pitch deck.

Let me tell you how I see the pitch. The purpose of it is to quickly explain the often complex business idea that you’ve worked on for a couple of months already (or didn’t, depending on your style…). It should be a short, very interesting story that explains why your idea is worth their time to dig further. Later on, it should have the capacity to explode into a business case and continue making the same sense. But at first, really don’t expect the short pitch to get you the money. Look at it as a micro conversion; it should only build up enough interest to get the investor to want another meeting.

Now, how to get it done? Well, in our case, we simply put together the story itself—how we started, what we did, how we discovered a gap in the market, and how we understand that gap. Then, we explained what problems we believe can be resolved and why resolving them would create great value for the potential user.

Two critical questions we had to answer were: “Why now is the right time for Thinkpilot?” and “How big is the market?”. Looking back now, those might be the two most important questions at pre-seed and everyone should have an excellent position in regards to them before meeting an investor.

I can’t tell you how to tell your story - that’s entirely individual. But my advice: if you’re looking for inspiration to start, go check decks from companies that were trained by Y Combinator. They are really good at pre-seed decks and how they prepare their companies for fundraising. We used their template a bit too late and still regret it.

Warming Up: Pre-Pitch for your Pre-Seed

Do not jump into fundraising mode right away! The moment you start asking about money, the game is on and there’s no going back. That’s why I'd say, get ready for the game and a good old warm-up can’t hurt you. We reached out to investors in our network and simply asked for their opinion on our idea. We did the pitch, presented the deck, but didn't ask for money. Remember the investor friend? Investors can introduce you to other investors for a friendly pitch - just sharing your idea and getting feedback. It's great to help break the ice and get tuned into the types of questions investors will ask.

Adjusting the Pitch

Adjusting the pitch and the pitch deck is a must. I would say the only scenario when you don’t need to continue iterating is when you quit and end the project. As the story develops, so does the pitch. For us, every conversation with an investor added to our story. Their perspectives, small hints of disagreement, and their directly negative feedback should get reflected in your story.

We never got struck by an ego blow when an investor gave us negative feedback or disagreed with a part of the idea we found totally correct. Instead of starting to defend our idea, we jumped to wanting to understand their thinking process. Our idea doesn’t need defending; it needs to get better and better, and only by perfectly understanding the critiques can we do so. I firmly believe that one should leave their ego behind when pitching and genuinely focus on the feedback. Try to capture every reaction and learn from it.

Our first-ever pitch deck was completed in the beginning of April. By the end of May, we had four different editions of it, with more than 50 iterations in total. We actually got to a funny point where, when talking to an investor, we didn’t know which pitch deck brought them to us. Recently I heard from a great founder that he typically has around 100 iterations. A long way to go for us!

Step 5: Ready, Steady, Go! Fundraising Season Open

Finally we got to the high-stakes game. Except there was not much we could lose. Yes, a couple of months invested in the idea and some cash but we had everything to gain.

In our case, we started the fundraising game in April while the official project kick-off was in January. I was working full-time while my co-founders worked in their spare time. I'd say our work totalled around 5 working months. We also didn’t spare spending resources on it - where there is passion, sacrifices will follow. I could have added a brand new upper-class adventure bike to my motorbike collection for the money poured into this project! Anyway, similar to motorcycling, once you go on the road, you need to be really focused. Therefore, we didn’t have the illusion that while fundraising we would do many other things.

And that’s how it went. We went head-on with a team of angel investors that we considered must-haves on board our project. Three exceptional people, each with a different set of skills and mindset, any one of them a target customer of our product, and together, the three of them formed one hell of a co-founding team. I wish for anyone to have the chance to work with such inspiring people. I was lucky enough to spend a year of my career committed to them.

But yeah, full focus, no distractions. We started to work hard on preparing a personalized pitch for them. Ditched our regular pitch deck and started our presentation from scratch, fully tailored for them, taking their past experience into account. We emphasized problems they had specifically experienced that our product was seeking to solve. Looking retrospectively, I think that if they hadn’t bought the idea, it would have been a huge red flag - simply because the idea itself was inspired by people like them. If they didn’t see the value in it, then there was likely no value to be had.

We had two meetings, with a gap in between that could have been shorter. But to be fair, it’s hard to catch the fantastic trio at the same time (hugs guys, if you are reading this). In any case, this was such a critical part of our fundraising journey that we stopped any other fundraising efforts. It was all about winning them. Mission-critical, as we often say. Yet, the style we used was very important. We weren’t focused on the money; we simply wanted to kick off as soon as possible but under a very important condition: the business case truly made sense.

I’ll repeat myself because it is so important: The commitment doesn’t only come from the investors who give the money. The commitment is within us, to push when everyone says no, to invest 6, 7, 8, or sometimes even more than 10 years of our time serving beyond our personal interests. We never got blinded by the idea of going for the money and starting ASAP. A solid direction is what mattered, and all the meetings with investors we had were refining that direction.

Next up, were some VCs -  we started from a single local VC fund. News very quickly spread around. It kind of happened faster than what we were prepared for. We were lucky to quickly get put in touch with this local fund that is typically not too excited for pre-seed deals but showed interest. Yes, you probably guessed it right, our investor friend played a role in this luck happening. But the luck was also helped by a local networking event. There were many investors and startups at it. We participated in the event, and my co-founders and I tried to talk to as many investors as possible, doing our best to pitch the idea and build awareness.

Right after this event, a few VC funds followed up with us. Others that we hadn’t yet met reached out. It seems that when you speak to an investor who doesn’t have interest in your project—whether due to the early stage, market, or even technology—that doesn’t mean they won’t share your pitch deck with other investors who they feel might show interest. That’s why the first impression counts. We were open, and curious, trying to capture feedback, and show our passion for the idea. If someone showed interest, we’d jump on a follow-up call and start a conversation.

Getting Grilled by a VC Fund

Getting grilled by a VC fund is something you can’t avoid—or maybe there’s something wrong with my logic. But in order to invest, a VC definitely needs to feel fully comfortable. And even though you might think that the money is what investors put at stake, I feel there is something more important than the money: their reputation and name. Investors are smart, well-connected, and influential people. They work hard to build a profile of a successful company that can multiply money. Every time they make a poor bet, they take a blow to their reputation, and that hurts much more than the money they lose. The money they will spend anyway; it’s all about making the right bets more often than not and keeping a solid reputation and brand.

With that in mind, we expected a thorough process with multiple meetings that would allow them to grasp and properly judge our idea. As they say, they need to build conviction in your case and that takes time. At the pre-seed stage, that conviction is extremely hard to build due to the lack of numbers. That’s why they can compensate in one way only: start digging for problems. For every problem theory they build, they will ask you many questions to help themselves prove that the problem exists. It’s much easier for them to say "No" rather than "Yes" if they can find a crack in your plan.

We had a total of four formal meetings with a single VC fund that got interested in our idea. To give you a feel of the experience, imagine yourself in a room with a lot of smart people whose only job is to ask challenging questions and figure out a way to make you show any kind of weakness or misconception in your idea. It was hard, and at some point, you can’t tell whether you’re speaking nonsense or answering with something you genuinely believe in. That’s just because you can’t anticipate all the questions in advance, and sometimes there are questions that are not relevant to your stage in the process. I can only guess that their game plan was to simply see how we think about the future of our idea.

Now, apart from the idea, there’s something else that gets grilled pretty hard: the team. Turns out investors care very little about your idea at the pre-seed stage; what they truly bet on is the team itself. No matter how you describe your brilliant idea, they pay most attention to the market behind it and its potential - and the thing that matters most is how good the team is at serving that market. Are the team members great at execution, do they complement each other, and do they have what it takes to prevail in the market?

Honestly, it’s super lucky to end up with a strong team. Often, you haven’t worked with your partners before. So what should you do to make sure the team looks great? Nothing. Really, as crazy as it sounds, if there is a weakness in the team dynamics, the best thing that can happen is that the investors who evaluate you notice it. And they are pretty good at that. This can save you a ton of trouble down the road. Remember, you are in it for the long run, building that damn unicorn. And the truth is that only exceptional teams can build unicorns. Teams are rarely born exceptional, but they can have capacity to work their way towards it!

You see, the opportunity with a VC fund doesn’t end the moment they reject you. In reality, saying "No" today doesn’t mean "No" forever. Their job is to look and find strong potential. Sometimes they can’t see potential right away, but in time they might. But that’s great for you too—just make sure to extend your curiosity, capture feedback, and study the cracks they saw in your idea and team. Then the ball is back in your court. Turn the cracks into strengths, work hard with your founding team, and make sure that the next time you show up in front of those investors, you can tell how the story continued since your last talk. How you evolved, adapted, and improved. This is what matters and what they want to see.

Good luck to all of you who are soon to face a grilling! Those battles bring great joy no matter how emotionally exhausting they are. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger!

The First Soft Committed Money

You play, you win; you don’t play, you can’t win. So we did play, and eventually, we made a win. Remember the fantastic trio? Well, they saw potential, liked the problems we identified, and got excited by our solution. They believed that our team was capable of delivering it. And so, we earned their soft commitment for a good portion of our pre-seed round. Of course, it came with an important condition: better validation.

No matter how well the problem resonates with a person, their natural reaction is to seek other’s opinions. And more importantly, in the startup prism, “will it sell?”. For any product specialist, this is a natural reaction. When you tell a product builder that you’ve identified a painful problem, they can evaluate it through their prism. But they know better than to only trust themselves. That’s why the next thing they need is validation. That could be more interviews, some people who committed to pay for the product, or even a group of people who signed up for the beta version. There are many approaches, but all of them should end up with some number at the end. As long as you can add logical explanations as to how you reached that number and show that the number proves your theorized problem, you are good.

Again, one might think, why not fake the number? Well, truth be told, investors are quite used to risking their money—that’s what they do on a daily basis. It’s you who takes the greater risk to commit 18+ months of your life to something that can be wrong in its very inception. You don’t want that.

That's why we are now in this early validation stage. Before building the product, we are trying to get some traction and see if people are interested in our solution. As hard as it is, it's better to do validation than not in any case, both for the sake of potential investment and for our own confirmation that our chosen direction is the right one.

Getting Rejected by a VC Fund

If you don’t want to get rejected by an investor, there’s a great trick to it: don’t go to fundraise. But yet, we were fundraising and naturally, we got rejected by VC funds—many times. I already told you about the cracks; we had some, and we are now strengthening both our team and business case. We are taking it as an opportunity to tart with a more solid foundation.

Yes, you still feel that you are losing time. You could start your project earlier if it weren’t for the rejections. But honestly speaking, time is something you have in abundance during the pre-seed stage. In most cases, it doesn’t really matter when you will kick off. In the rare cases where you want to take advantage of some passing opportunity, trend, or seasonal occurrence, think twice. If it’s so easy to miss the perfect moment, does that make it a good foundation for a long-lasting business?‍

What We Learnt and Where Next for Thinkpilot

If our story has a message to take away for me today I think it would be the change in mindset that slowly grew in me and my co-founders.

In the beginning, I had certain ideas about investors that proved unhelpful. A truth that might be unwise to share is that initially I was skeptical about the fundraising and the role of investors. Transparency is a key value me and my co-founders share. So while the below might sound a bit alarming to investors - we hide nothing! The good news is, my perspective changed a lot.

At first, I had serious doubts that they could grasp a sophisticated product concept at a pre-seed stage. Getting conviction about whether something will have product-market fit is extremely complex, even for a hardcore product specialist. How could I believe that a generalist, such as the typical investor, could understand the product idea? That early, you don't have any numbers, and investors are pretty good at numbers—they feel really uncomfortable when there aren't any.

Additionally, I felt that the whole fundraising process took too much time while not being able to build anything. It's like you pause the business to get money to continue the business—or, in our case, to start the business. It truly felt strange, like we were losing valuable time.

And finally, as crazy as it seems, I was scared of the money. I didn't like the fact that typically investors were looking to give money for a runaway of at least 18 months, and in many cases, even beyond 24 months. In my head, any MVP project that takes longer than 8 months to hit the market and answer the product-market fit question is too dangerous.
So what would happen in 8 months if we don’t hit PMF? Would we have extra money for a team vacation to Hawaii? Or would we have money that is supposed to fit into another idea? I'm not afraid to pivot; it's just really expensive to do it while having a full-time team onboard. And what if I don't feel like going after another idea?

However, these perceptions all changed -

Now that I have passed a round in the grinder, I can see that that process made both our team and idea stronger. Yes, we haven’t finished the fundraising yet, but we took our lessons and are now working on all the cracks that were revealed. Investors were and will continue to be essential in teaching us these lessons. We improved our mindset and our team thanks to them. The game is interesting, the questions challenging, and there is a lot of food for thought along the way. It feels that apart from being driven by our vision, we also realized that this journey deeply changes who we are, hones new skills, thinking, and provides experiences fueled with true passion. It's totally worth the try, no matter the outcome.

And when it comes to the weight of the money that forces you to look out for pivots in case the original idea fails - Well, as good as an idea is, it means nothing without the people who drive it. The fact of the money no longer scares me, but has made me focus on the strength of the team. If we are a strong team, we will find a way to deliver even if our idea has to change. I am trying to picture a point in the future where me and my friends (now co-founders) share drinks and think of the good old times. I don't see us impressed with ourselves, talking about how great the idea was. Instead, I think we will remember the funny moments, the challenges, and the passion that we shared as a team. So what if we have to pivot? Another story to tell ourselves at the end of the day. Another set of lessons and challenges. I guess pivots at the end sound fun, don’t they?

Our Story Continues

Now, you might wonder how the story ends? This post is much more about how the story continues than its end.

Our biggest lesson from the whole story is that the most important thing is the team, then the idea, and finally each individual on the team. The idea gathers the individuals, but as soon as they turn into a team, they become the most valuable asset in the pre-seed stage. So, monetize it, strengthen it. The outcome will follow.

We haven’t yet raised the full amount needed to hire our whole team. So if you are an investor and kept reading all along, say hi, here’s how you can reach out. If you are a founder, product builder, or decision-maker, I’d say you definitely need to learn more about what we do.

We are now working hard on building our product, and we won’t stop fundraising. Nothing wrong with pushing two fronts, especially when the efforts go in the same direction. While the goal at the end matters, it’s all about the journey, and this is merely how it starts. We aim to have fun!