🔀 pitching to the wrong investors

This week in The Pivot: pitching your friends and family startup to seed-stage VCs and expecting a check.

🚨 NEW: Cameron and I are super happy to be launching the Traction Lab Venture School, a new program to help founders of early-stage startups find paying customers. Our first cohort kicks off on March 23rd and spots are limited.

Learn more →

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Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The antipattern: Pitching to VCs pre-traction.

Founders constantly get rejected by VCs who “want to see more traction”, when the real problem is that they shouldn’t be pitching their pre-traction, pre-revenue startup to VC firms in the first place.

It’s like trying to sell a Pinto to someone shopping for a Ferrari.

VCs at the seed and Series A stages just aren’t interested in your stage of company—they’re looking for different metrics, different milestones, different scale, and a lot more evidence.

So you waste months getting “advice” misaligned with where you actually are, then burn credibility by coming back too early.

The fix: Pitch to the right investors.

In other words: match your fundraising outreach to your actual stage.

If you’re pre-revenue and need $50K for experimentation, VCs are not your customer. Target angels who write smaller checks. They’re not looking for high-conviction go-to-market motion. They’re looking for high-conviction founders.

But VCs want retention curves, payback periods, and growth rates you don’t have yet. The advice they give you (“you sound underfunded,” “come back with more traction”) is fundamentally misaligned to where you actually are.

Don’t burn time on the wrong investors.

The tool: The Investment Readiness Scorecard

Set expectations with yourself by mapping your current state of evidence across the 8 Ts of Fundability to our Investment Readiness Scorecard (click to embiggen):

Until next week,

—jdm

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