The Scientific Guide To Build An Investment-Ready Startup
Purpose: Bookmark this link and check back for new articles if you want to ready your startup to become not only investment-ready to raise pre-seed funding and/or get into an accelerator, but also to build a startup foundation that maximizes the effective use of funding towards achieving product market fit, future rounds of funding, and growth for a profit-driven startup with a super useful product at its center.
After training over 300 founders to build investment-ready startups. I have found that founders that have not put together the major startup building blocks become increasingly frustrated, find out their product is lacking, encounter traction and growth problems, lag behind competitors, quickly burn through capital or can’t even raise capital from professional investors in the first place, fight with and/or lose co-founders, and make needless sacrifices on their precious money, time, and life in general. In short, if you are experiencing trouble with your startup, you can refer to this scientific guide to make sure you have covered all your bases in building the foundation of an investment-ready startup. Hopefully, it helps you to replace frustration with practical methods that produce real progress. Veterans of building investment-ready startups will quickly point out that a lack of awareness and focus in achieving each of these milestones results in detrimental startup pitfalls.
We will slightly optimize this guide for startups building on Bitcoin, but since the process is scientific, it will work for any real startup idea.
The Scientific Milestones and Methods to Building Investment-Ready startups for Pre-seed stage.
- What is the leading cause of startup failure and how to overcome it.
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2. What kind of failure accelerates you toward success and what kind of failure is detrimental to success?
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3. How big is the gap in effectiveness between untrained vs trained startup founders learning in a group of founders, mentors, and pre-seed investors?
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4. Highly Effective Habits of Successful Founders: The traits, mindset, and time management of founders who successfully find The Fulcrum and build an investment-ready startup and how to develop those traits and mindset.
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5. What exactly is considered a REAL startup?
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6. Team formation: What is an effective core startup team?
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7. Time: The perception of time, market timing, and your most valuable & limited resource.
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8. Why is financing 100% necessary for you to build a REAL startup?
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9. The Fulcrum: The ephemeral leverage point that you need to build an investment-ready startup.
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10: The Angel Users/Customers & Design Partners: Every founder needs to find them to begin building an investment-ready startup.
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11. How to research, find, and understand angel users and design partners?
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12. Getting user traction well before a basic product is coded and launched.
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13. Testing your Revenue Model before your product is coded and launched.
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14. Proof of Concept: A highly-effective strategy to build the beginnings of a product that could sustain an investment-ready startup.
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15. What is PMF and how to develop effective muscle memory to get to PMF?
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16. What can be considered unfair advantages for your startup.
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17. The differences in users behavior between Testnet vs Mainnet for Web3 and Bitcoin Startups
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18. Pre-seed Deck and Pitch: What is the scientific way to build a pre-seed deck and pitch?
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Summary of Benefits: This series of short articles is designed to be a scientific guide for any founder who is intent on learning the proven building blocks and mental frameworks necessary to obtain the milestones of an investment-ready startup that maximizes pre-seed funding. To be clear, this is not a guide to raise pre-seed funding, rather it is a guide that helps you build a solid startup so that when you do raise pre-seed funding, you have something tangible and impressive to show investors and when you receive pre-seed funding you can scientifically grow your startup in an effective way to reach product market fit and the next round of funding.
Caveat: I don’t suggest you use this guide for anything other than a startup that can grow fast because, in the soon-to-be-released soon to be released writings and how-to guide, I don’t point out which parts overlap with a normal business and I don’t talk about how to apply the guide to a normal business.
Invitation to Contributors: If you want to contribute, I invite you or your friends to reach out to me, be you dreaming about starting up, first-time founder, serial founder, founder with successful exit(s), unicorn founder, founder turned investor, or even an investor who is just an investor without firsthand startup experience. I welcome other methodologies. Also, you don’t need to have the answers to contribute: Even sharing the challenges you encountered on the path to building an investment-ready startup or even the roadblocks you experienced in trying to build an investment-ready startup also contributes to a more solid framework.
Bookmark: This is a living document. We aim to add links every couple of days as we write out this scientific guide on how to build an investment-ready startup for pre-seed funding. So bookmark this link and check back twice a week for updates and new links.
