Gideon Henry

At what point does a product become ready to talk to investors?

When you have users?
Revenue?
A clear business model?
A certain number of people using it?

Especially for solo or small-team makers, it feels twice as hard to reach all of these points alone - while continuing to build the product without income and bootstrapping everything.

At some point, it starts to feel like an infinite loop:

i can never tell what is a genuine from a real user versus someone just hyping up their friend's project. Some discussion threads feel authentic, where people ask tough questions, offer genuine feedback, and point out potential issues. Other times, the whole section is just a wall of generic praise like "congrats on the launch" and "this looks incredible" without any real substance.
It makes it hard to gauge whether a tool is actually solid or if people are just being polite. I find myself ignoring most of the surface-level compliments and actively searching for the few comments that bring up actual use cases, flaws, or comparisons to existing tools.

How do you evaluate the feedback on a launch page? Do the comments ever actually change your mind about giving a product a shot, or do you ignore them entirely and just test things out yourself?

I have noticed I judge products almost entirely off the free version, which is probably unfair but also kind of the point. If the free tier is annoying, limited in a way that feels deliberate, or nags me constantly, i usually bail before I ever see what the paid version can do.

But sometimes the free tier is so generous I never feel a reason to upgrade, which I guess is a different problem for whoever made it. And other times the free version is fine but I can tell the real product is hiding behind the paywall, so I am basically reviewing a demo.

I do not really have a point here, just curious if anyone else forms strong opinions off the free tier alone. Do you give something a fair shot before deciding, or does the free experience make or break it for you?