A friend of mine based in Berlin attended a fundraising call between two colleagues of him and a Berlin based investor. They are trying to raise a 2M euros seed round at 10M post money.
The investor told them in order to invest he wants to see numbers.
This made me think that any numbers they will show at this stage will be so small to make any sense.
I am not pro pitching investors right after launching the MVP*. Any loser can build and launch MVP. The tough part is getting people to use what you built, tell their friends about it, and pay for it. Add to this as Mark Suster puts it, it is easier to invest in lines than dots. I see launching the MVP is a dot. Making progress is a line.
So I am wondering if an investor is valuing a seed stage startup based on traction, how much traction is a good traction?
* There are exceptions to this. Some might even need to pitch investors before building the MVP. Dropbox is an example of this. Even an MVP of Dropbox would’ve been so expensive to build without investment.