Peerspace's fundraising strategy reveals that early investors want 500+ bookings before writing checks, while Series B investors focus on data and forecasts. The founder bootstrapped to prove traction first, then raised capital. Founders should build scalable bookings and clear milestones before pitching.
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you share maybe what the fundraising journey has been like? Yeah. So, you know, fundraising marketplaces are tough. They, their investors, I think, are excited about the opportunity because it is innovative and just can be disruptive. And they know that marketplaces are asset light. And especially if you have a larger market, there's a big opportunity there. But when you are at your earliest stages, You're approaching investors as an unknown quantity, you know, and they need to believe, like, how is this better than the alternatives? And, you know, can you just, can you show me the traction you have essentially? And that was a lot of our experience early on. I think it's important and you should expect to have some sort of meaningful traction in order to drive any interest at all. It becomes a lot easier in kind of later stages, I would say, like, you know, Series B+, because you can rely on, you know, the inbound data that you have and, you know, your analytics and your forecasting and be able to show that this business can grow to X size. But early on for us, I mean, we had a lot, lots of investor meetings, We would get really far. We would get some nos, many nos and, you know, a couple of yeses along the way. But, you know, in the pre-seed and seed stage, we would just ask some of these investors who would say, you know, what do you, what would you want to see from us in order to seriously consider this investment, particularly if we thought it was more of gonna, it was kind of more of an informational meeting and I think we were told like, come back when you have 500 bookings or 500 transactions. And I, what I took from that is they just wanted to see some data. They wanted to see that there was like some kind of trend emerging that you were solving for, you know, and have something to sort of poke and prod on to decide if this was something that was working for them. So So yeah, I would recommend, this is another reason why I say like figure out if you can get by without funding because you probably have to build something, launch it and actually get the bookings and demonstrate that the bookings are happening in a way that is close to your desired vision for the product, you know, like It's, it can be scalable. I think once we demonstrated that, it became a little easier to convince investors that this was at least, you know, worth taking the meeting on and worth doing the due diligence on. But yeah, fundraising is hard and I, from what I hear now, it's even harder right now. And there's lots of reasons for that. And so I would just, encourage everybody to think about, like, you know, how far can you get with what you have? And where do you need to be by what time in order to say that this is, you know, viable to get you to the next phase?
