u/ottodirk

Need help: I’m a founder raising for a pre-seed, pre-revenue startup. Live product, real users, engagement beating benchmarks. We’re a marketplace where the core behavior is new, so part of the raise funds building the habit itself, not just acquiring users into an existing one.

The struggle: every “no” is “more traction.” But a new-behavior marketplace needs acquisition spend to hit critical mass before revenue, which is what the raise funds.

Investors want the outcome the investment is supposed to produce.

For anyone who’s been through it:

1.	Chicken-and-egg (the real one): Pre-revenue, thesis is building a new habit at scale. Does nobody invest until revenue shows? Or is there a way to frame pre-revenue marketplace traction that lands at pre-seed? What did your “yes” look like?  
2.	investor Outreach: Finding thesis- and stage-aligned investors and getting to a real conversation. Tools like Raisi got me intros, not momentum. Intro-to-pitch is where I get stuck.  
3.	Legit fundraising support: Fundraising help (consultants, boutique accelerators to a certain extent) actually worth it? Not the “blast your deck to 500 investors” crowd.  
4.	Daily grind: what’s the day-to-day like? I’ve been researching left and right, following advice that I see online, but most are non-responsive, they say we’re off-thesis, or require more traction. what changed between the rounds that stalled and the one that closed?

Happy to share more via DMs.

I’ll just say it upfront: I’m a founder with a toddler, currently building a startup, and some days I genuinely don’t know how I’m keeping it together.

The conventional startup narrative rewards the unburdened. No kids, no mortgage, just raw hours. And there’s truth in that. A 22-year-old can outwork almost anyone on pure time availability.

But I keep wondering whether the experience side of the ledger actually closes the gap. Fifteen-plus years of pattern recognition, knowing which mistakes to skip, having a real network you can call, understanding which battles are actually worth fighting. Does that buy back enough to compete with someone who can grind 80 hours without a second thought?

And then there’s the question I think about more than I’d like. Some of the most “successful” founder-parents, by the metrics that get celebrated, end up with kids who barely know them. You see the exit. You see the Forbes profile. You don’t see what the relationship looks like at home.

Not moralizing. Genuinely asking: how are other founder-parents navigating this? Did the experience advantage turn out to be real, or is it something you told yourself to feel better about the decision to do this? And how do you think about the tradeoff, not abstractly, but in actual day-to-day terms?