Fundraising is hard
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I built a movie ranking app with AI, kind of a mixture between Letterboxd and Beli. I've been running it for about a year and overall seeing decent usage and users seem to be enjoying the product.
It's got some traction around 60 DAU, 1k MAU but it's not growing because I'm not as aggressive with marketing as I should be. It has decent retention with ~30 % D7 and ~15% D28.
Would it be possible to raise pre-seed (<$1M) with VC at all? I plan to use proceeds to hire a founding engineer and go full-time.
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I am software engineer and what I am witnessing right now makes me think about future of software. Most people in tech that I know personally are starting to get sick of it and considering exiting tech altogether.
Startups are mostly focusing on AI which is understandable but the market feels extremely saturated already. It’s constant battle for customers. And the products themselves seem so uninspired.
Also saw a graph with number of apps being added to AppStore (huge spike) but at the same time decrease in downloads and usage. Are people focusing on living offline more?
Software just does not seem to have the same appeal as before. I am currently taking a break from work but I am having a hard time thinking about coming back - I don’t like managing agents honestly, makes me feel useless.
Maybe this is just my social bubble and I am really interested in other opinions on this.
I will not promote
Recently moved from product building to sales and started traveling to meet customers in my niche. I have already built a startup (was COO and not Founder) in this space previously in B2B but want to ask the community for advice on growth and managing new customer expectations.
For us building never stops and I was constantly adding features and PRs which led to sales getting stalled. Now I have an enterprise sales lead and me traveling and meeting customers. How did you guys do it? My stretch goal for the year is cross 1M in ARR. We are about 30% there and 6 months into Sales.
We plan on attending conferences, already got customer references, and partnership offers
