The New Pre-Seed: Harder to Get In, More Reward if You Do (with Julia Yu)

This week in the Product Hunt blog, we have a banger from Julia Yu. She's the co-founder of 2024 Golden Kitty winner Unicorns Club, which matches VCs with early-stage startups. She's also founded three VC-backed companies herself.

According to Julia, early-stage founders need to change their mental model about pre-seed funding ASAP. As she puts it:

Once upon a time (in fact, as recently as two years ago), early-stage startups needed three things to get into investor conversations: a strong narrative, a solid team, and a prototype. Now, in most software categories, that’s no longer enough.

The advent of AI has shifted investors’ attention to actual metrics. Yes, even at the pre-seed level, investors don’t care so much about promise as they do about realized potential. They want monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth rate.

This could seem like bad news, but Julia's collected a lot of data points working with founders and investors — and she's not afraid to share them. In the blog, she covers 1) how to know when your product is ready to fundraise, and 2) what to say/show to investors when you get that meeting.

Read it here.