Anti-Cacophony Partners
Traction at Pre-Seed Is No Longer Optional
It’s been written a thousand times, but yes, AI has made it cheaper than ever to launch a startup. Great. Awesome. Until your pre-seed raise for your non-AI startup, with its brilliant vision, defensible approach, innovative technology, great TAM, etc, feels exceptionally hard to raise for right now.
I’m in the middle of several pre-seed raises at the moment, all outside AI. Setting aside the usual summer slowdown (August is always dead, that’s not new), three things stand out:
- Pre-seed investors expect traction before the first meeting. I’ve written about this previously, it’s not new, but it’s worth repeating: because AI dropped the cost of building and launching, the question in every investor’s head is, if it’s this cheap to build, why haven’t you? Even at pre-seed, they want proof of demand before they’ll take the call.
- And “traction” now means real numbers. LTV/CAC. Payback period. Revenue data. Metrics nobody asked a pre-seed founder about a few years ago.
- My hunch (I can’t confirm this from the investor side): if it’s cheaper to launch, and more founders are launching, and more founders are raising, then it’s very likely that investor inboxes are getting flooded. If your cold outreach is landing worse than it used to, that’s probably why. Warm intros matter more than ever.
But don’t kid yourself. A warm intro gets you the meeting. It doesn’t make the traction question go away. You still need a credible demand story when you walk in.
So if you’re raising pre-seed outside AI: get a customer to pay you before you ask an investor to fund you. Or, even, consider doing a smaller angel round to help you get that initial traction.
Founders and investors, what are y’all seeing out there?