Do these 4 Things to Prepare Your PRE-SEED Startup PITCH (A-Z Startup Funding Series Part 2)

What to prepare when you plan on raising a pre-seed round and why you need to look for these specific things to make your life a whole bunch easier. This is part of my ongoing A to Z pre-seed funding series. We've already done A, B, C, and D in this series. You can go watch those other videos. In this one, we're going to cover E, F, G, and H. And

the no fluff too long did not read is they stand for execution speed, founder fits, manual first go to market strategy, and high versus low intent signal tracking. Before you start fundraising, you need to immediately think how fast are we going to execute and ratchet it up to a 10x'er. Because right now, speed of execution is being measured literally in days versus months like it used to be before. Then there are founder fits. Specifically, there's founder problem fit, are you the right founder with the right expertise to solve this problem, and there's founder market fit, do you have the ability to understand how to go get sales, go contact potential buyers in channels that you recognize, understand how competition reflects in those channels, and also contact other expert advisers and open those doors because you're already inside the industry in which you're solving the problem for. Investors will automatically look at those two fits and make them part of the decision-making rubric before giving you funding. But those two fits also make your life a whole bunch easier versus trying to solve a problem that you're not suited to solve. Just cuz you care about it doesn't mean you should be solving it. And also getting distribution because development is easier, distribution is much harder, and you want to start with a leg up, not behind the eight ball or not in the hole that you have to dig yourself out of. Then you will do things that don't scale, and that means manual hand-to-hand combat founder led sales. This is going to form your go-to-market strategy in the future that investors want to see, allow you to scale very quickly. And finally, as you are conducting your manual go-to-market, you are going to be tracking high versus low intent signals and data. These are more important than ever because you can feed all this information into an AI agent to assist you and supercharge your traction to get to that fundraise. That's if you even need funding after you do all this, and you might not. And that's what I want for you is the optionality to decide. Now that we've gotten that out

of the way for those of you with teeny tiny attention spans, you can move on to the next video. Or you can stay here and do a deep dive into E, F, G, and H in my A to Z funding series. Before we continue, my name is Ed Kang. If we haven't met before, thank you for coming back. Use the chapter markers as always to skip to the good part of the video. If we haven't met, I'm a seven-time funded founder with two exits. I'm also the chief strategy officer of startups. com where I help hundreds of founders all the time do their capital raises, especially at pre-seed. I myself have raised over $100 million for my startups, other startups, as well as startup funds. And I call myself a chief funding execution officer, which is what I think every founder should become or assign one person in your company, your startup, to be the CFXO. I'm also building the CFXA, which is the chief funding execution agent to help you with all of this. Check out the description of this video for some freebies, some announcements, and opportunities to work with me as your adviser. While you're there, do the YouTube thing, like, comment, subscribe, always helpful. Let me know what you think, would love to hear from you. Let's jump into part two of the A to Z pre-seed funding series.

Execution speed today is accelerating at a crazy pace cuz you can go get an agent to 100x your output. The problem is that we can't process all that output that fast. So you have to be strategic in determining what to do first, and that's what investors are looking to you for. Just because an AI can do it doesn't mean it's going to be productive for you. And things that feel urgent might not actually be important. And now, with all these AI agents running around, investors want to know you are the one that can make those decisions, that you are truly the leader of your startup. Here are the tips for execution speed. You want to be thinking in days, not weeks. able to say to investors, we vibe coded our first MVP in a weekend and we started demoing it to customers that Monday. This brings in the founder problem fit and founder market fit, which I'll touch on in just a moment. But understand that it's now week over week metrics that investors want to see versus total metrics. There's a big difference than saying we reached a million dollars over the last year and we've grown 10% week over week to get to 40-50,000 dollars MRR in the last 30 days. A lot of founders try to sort of fudge their numbers in their pitch decks and give monolithic numbers. Investors can see through that a mile away. If you can't break down your revenue in week over week metrics, investors aren't going to trust you. You cannot wait for investor funding to go out and execute to get those week over week metrics going. If you're telling investors, I can't do anything until we get your funding, investors are going to make that an automatic no. So you need to wipe that excuse from your mind. Even though it might be grounded in truth, I get it. It's like chicken and egg. And founders ask me all the time, "Ed, it's like investors want me to create a chicken without an egg or an egg without a chicken. " And my answer is, "Yes and yes. " Investors expect you to be exceptional, relentlessly resourceful founders because you're competing with so many other founders vying for the same limited amount of capital out there for funding. And you may not be able to pull off all the traction and get the revenue that you are eventually going to do if you get that funding, but you can at least get started with AI today. There are so many options and opportunities for you to just pay a few bucks a month and get the flywheel rolling, including founder led sales

which leads us to the founder fits. It's not just your fitness and how fit you are for this startup grind, but how well you fit your startup and you fit your market. As introduced, there are two founder fits we're looking for. Founder problem fit, which is answering the question, do you have the domain expertise to be the right founder to fit this problem, to create the solution for the problem? Because the more founder problem fit you have, the easier it will be to achieve problem solution fit with your first MVP. The next fit is founder market fit, and this is the test. Can you call 10 experts and customers for your potential product even before it's created, even before there's anything to demo? It's just an idea in your head, a sparkle and a twinkle in your eye. Can you call 10 potential customers and 10 experts and talk to them about it, and will they be happy to take your call? I've had so many founders crash and burn because they don't have founder problem fit and founder market fit. They go out and try to solve a problem that they really care about, and that's totally okay. I do this all the time. I try and solve problems that I have that are personal itches, that are personal pain points for me, but I really don't have the expertise. But that doesn't mean I should raise funding and risk somebody else's money and my livelihood, including the cost of opportunity, to make it an official startup. But that doesn't mean you can't go out and learn the domain expertise. I have a video game startup in my unicorn portfolio, Y Combinator, one of the companies that I want to get to making a million dollars a year. But I had no domain expertise in the gaming industry, and I went out and learned it from scratch. Therefore, that startup has kind of sat on the back burner, and I'm slowly incubating it, maybe a few weekends every single year, and it's taken me years to get to this point in time where people are actually playing the game and they're liking it. The point is, I haven't raised any money for it. I've bootstrapped it all myself, and you might be in the same situation. On the other side, when I first began advising at startups. com, I met a founder who was building robots for restaurants, but he never had experience in restaurants. He was an expert in robotics, but not in restaurants. He went and volunteered at a restaurant for free to learn how the entire restaurant works, all the pain points that they go through in getting the food from the kitchen, serving to the table, and then he got his big opportunity, and I believe he is in Dubai somewhere building robots for restaurants. Now, let's get to founder market fit. If you can't make that phone call, which many founders don't because I hear you out there, you say, "I built this product. How do I get my first customer? " That shouldn't even be a question that enters your mind if you have founder market fit. But just like founder problem fit, you can go get it. In fact, on the way of developing the domain expertise for founder problem fit, you'll start to develop founder market fit cuz you'll start making those contacts. You'll start meeting those potential customers and having meaningful conversations with them. But you have to understand how business is done, how things are sold. Because let's say you're trying to build a B2B solution, some type of AI agent for particular industry with a painful problem. That industry might be protected with gatekeepers, or they might not accept you or think you're credible at all if you're coming in just as rookie and you know nothing about it. But as you develop that domain expertise, or let's say you already have it, founder market fit allows you to find the contacts that will give you leverage, that you can just pick up the phone and call and start developing your network and taking advantage of it for whatever situation that you're in. It might be founder led sales or getting introduced to an investor, an angel that's interested in that particular industry. I know a founder, I interviewed him on the startups. com channel, that went out and sat in the offices of these very large retail companies. We're talking like Costco and Sam's Club. And before he even built anything, he asked them, "Why do you have this problem? What's going on there? " And they said, "If you can solve it," they agreed to the pricing, and he had so many major logos on his sheet, his proposal, with just a mock-up of what it would look like. He scored a million dollars. But not only that, he didn't have to raise anymore because he got a bank to give him a credit line for a hundred million dollars. That is the epitome of founder market fit, and I'm telling you, if you don't have it now, it is possible to build it, but you're going to make your life easier if you're working on a startup where you've got pre-existing founder problem fit and pre-existing founder market fit. So consider this very carefully. G stands

for go-to-market strategy, and you are going to do it manually first. This brings the time-old adage that we hear from Y Combinator and other investors, start with things that don't scale. That means doing things manually, getting up close and personal. So many founders worry about scale upfront that they miss all the learning opportunities in doing things in terms of hand-to-hand combat. To fulfill this, you're going to go out and get 10 customers to agree to your price. You've already set the table, the foundation is there with founder problem fit, and go out there and be a domain expert and talk meaningfully about it, and you've got founder market fit where you can actually pick up the phone and get in touch with 10 potential customers. They'll also have the backing of 10 experts on your advisory board or people who have endorsed your solution, or those 10 experts have referred you to the potential customers cuz they believe in you, and that's a major endorsement, a sign of traction, a great signal that you've de-risked the investment enough to get those advisors referring those 10 potential customers. The point is, get them to agree to the price. Ask, "What would it take for you to make a commitment? What do they need to see? " They will explain it to you if your idea is validated and it's crystal clear enough that they think to themselves, "Wow, bless your heart. Thank God for you that you're solving this problem. This has been so painful. " Which means the more painful it is, the more they're willing to give you the goods on what you need, which you'll eventually tell to investors. After that, you're going to identify the one channel that they normally use. And this step is skipped so often by founders that they end up losing a lot of time, a lot of traction, and they spend resources that they don't have. That's why you can't shy away from founder-led sales. When you are face-to-face and you're getting that feedback, especially after you tell them the price, as they say, no better time to get feedback than after they've got that sticker shock of what you plan to charge them, well, that's great data for you. Have a soft heart and thick skin and learn to empathize with them. But as they tell you what they need to make the decision, and you get a common pattern of those conversations across those 10 potential customers, you can ask them, "Where do you normally go to talk about this or look for a solution? " That gives you an indication of what channels they're working with because you cannot scale the things that don't scale with founder-led sales without actually looking at channels because channels represent ultimate scalability as you stack them on top of each other. Remember, development is easy, distribution is exceptionally hard right now. It's fragmented, costly, and everybody's totally confused. There are new ways to distribute. Just think about the difference between SEO and GEO right now. SEO used to be the king. Go out there and if you could rank in the top 10 of Google, you were selling like hotcakes, investors loved it. But now people are asking their LLMs what to buy. That's GEO, generative engine optimization, and that's the wild west. There's a whole new science. Therefore, you might be having conversations where a potential customer is saying, "Yeah, I used to go do a Google search, but now I ask ChatGPT. " And that's important information that investors going to want to know, but especially for you to go out and get those initial sales to get that revenue flywheel going because revenue is going to be the ultimate form of traction that shows investors that you've de-risked it enough and you deserve that investment. And finally

while you're doing EFG, you are tracking H, which is high versus low intent signals. I talk about this nonstop on my channel these days because in AI, tourism is a thing. Just because someone's willing to try your product doesn't mean that they're going to become a customer later on because so much on the internet with AI is free, people are experimenting. So churn rates are at an all-time high, and it just so happens all that free stuff that you're putting out there is gobbling up your credits and is very expensive, more and more expensive all the time as AI becomes more complex. The price of credits may be going down, but the complexity and the credit burn is going up, especially for free demos or people to try things just to churn a little later without paying you a single penny. What you're going to do is track which signals led to a conversion or a rejection. Remember, you're doing those founder-led sales, so you're going to get this data really quickly because you're going to tell investors the data that you're getting, the insights, the blow-by-blow, play-by-play on what you're learning to show the investors your process of figuring out how to make things scale after you've shown the willingness to do founder-led sales. Then the investor can make a mathematical decision. They can say, "All right, if one customer leads to two other referrals, if I pay money, and we know the channel that we have gotten conversion rate data on, if I put a little money into that, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire, I can get us 100 customers with this amount of money, which then leads to another 200 customers as a referrals. " That's when they can work the formula and project out, "Are you on your way with product market fit to hit the metrics that they need to see to warrant that investment? " Especially if they're institutional. They got VC funding, they're got LPs that want a specific type of return. That's how they make the calculation. And that makes things go from an emotional connection of story, which you're building with investors, to a rational one where they can go to their LPs or their investment committee or the managing partner and say, "Look at the data. This is legit. We've run our models. We've done our math. We are going to invest in this company. " And everyone goes, "Hooray, they're going to be a unicorn. Let's sign off. Let's make it happen. " And you're on your way. But the coolest part about all this data, which I'm doing now myself, is you'll be able to feed all this data into your LLM to create an agent skill later. Agentic skills are the new hack for founders. For example, I do pitch decks for a living. I have trained agents with all my history, all my language, all my lessons, and I know many other founders have done this as well, taking all my stuff. I encourage you to do it. Rip me off. Take all my transcripts and feed into an agent to do pitch decks that are faster, better, stronger. We have the technology than I ever could manually. I'm not someone trying to protect my ability to do pitch decks. It is manual labor, repetitive, and it drives me crazy sometimes. It's mind-numbing. So if an agent can do this for me and go out and accelerate you as a founder on your path to funding, more power to you and better for me because I can work with you on the cool stuff that I want to. And you can do this with sales. You can feed the data into an agent and say, "This was a win. Here are the conditions. Here's the language that I used. Now create a skill to basically 10x my productivity. " And you can be talking to more customers or at least gathering the intelligence and understanding how to approach a sales prospect if you're still doing it manually. But then AI is smart enough to take all that data and create a completely automated system, and you can compete with anybody else. The playing field is now even. You have access to automation tools that allow you to compete with the big companies with SaaS platforms that have been trying to do it the old-school way and are now trying to adapt. You are nimble, agile, you can pivot quickly, and build an agent that will do this autonomously on your behalf. It is the greatest time to take advantage of this opportunity when going out and getting the traction for your pre-seed startup. And that's it. If you haven't already, watch the other videos in this series or the ones that are recommended for you so you can continue to learn and we can do it together, especially if you're trying to put all of this in your pitch deck and you're further along. But do yourself a favor, work through the A to Z of pre-seed funding and see where you tick the boxes, and maybe you'll learn something along the way or you'll fill in a gap that you sorely needed to talk to those investors. Thanks for hanging out with me in this video. I'll see you in the next one.