I'm the founder of Stageworks.io a vertical SaaS for the performing arts sector. This is a crowded market and we have a fully-integrated solution that I'm confident will cut through. We launched in February and have good traction and early revenue. It's been all founder-led sales and word of mouth so far. We're adding new partners every week.

I'm raising $500k pre-seed to fund the initial GTM plan: sales, marketing, and customer success hires with aggressive outbound sales motion.

My background is both in tech and the arts. I have leaned on my existing tech network but struggled to find the right thesis fit with investors. We're too early for VCs and the tech Angels I talk with seem interested but are only investing in AI or other "deep tech" and don't know much about the arts.

I'm thinking of pivoting from the tech investors to high-net worth individuals that understand the arts world. An ideal fit is someone who has a business or entrepreneurial background but is also a big supporter of the arts. Maybe these people sit on the boards of arts organizations or financially support arts organizations.

I would love some advice on this approach. Thanks!

Try to think about what it's like to talk to you.

Here is what it's like to be invited to lunch.

 

I was failing chili PMF. Let me teach you to eat

ok 🧵 let me cook here for a sec — sandwich is post-PMF, we're not even debating that anymore. The original pain point was a fundamentally broken last-mile lunch experience with abysmal NRR (I was throwing out crusts, churn was insane).

I went first principles on the entire deli stack and realized the whole industry has been vibecoding sandwiches for sixty years with zero second-order thinking. So we rawdogged the deploy with a thesis-driven wheat-on-wheat thesis — non-consensus, hot take, but I have conviction this is generational. The mayo is our wedge, full stop — proprietary, defensible, a true moat, possibly the most agentic condiment shipped in our cohort, and frankly founder-market fit at its purest.

We're seeing 130% net retention on bites (I keep going back), CAC payback is under 4 seconds, the K-factor is north of 1.0 because my dog smelled it and now he's in the funnel too, and the whole engagement loop is honestly so tight it makes Notion look pre-revenue. Distribution > product of course, so GTM is a two-handed counter-to-mouth motion with white-glove onboarding (napkin) and an enterprise-grade chip side that I'm calling our land-and-expand play into the broader plate TAM.

Hunger is a real pain point.

AI-native ICP, we're flywheel-pilled, Jensen-pilled, Sequoia-curious, Subway is in our pre-seed and poppyseed round, and frankly the vibe shift in handheld lunch is RIGHT NOW — if you're not building in this space you're already cooked (not in the sandwich oven way).

Already getting inbound from my wife asking if I made one for her too which I'm treating as a soft-circled term sheet. Pre-seed deck is on Notion, S25 batch let's go, we're so back, the bag is sandwich-shaped, and I will absolutely be tweeting "1/14" about this on Monday. Build in public. Eat in public.

Ship lunch by lunch or you'll be left behind by me-too salad shops by next Tuesday.

Raising eleventy million dollars at a two years of the planet's GDP valuation, launching our first vibeslop agent on vercel next tuesday. It knows how to make racist comments about your startup in fifteen languages, all of them Canadian French

Term sheets accepted at thefuck@areyou.thinking

 

What you should have written

1. $40k of MRR, four months in, $9k spend on advertising, space is retail kangaroo meat for car fuel, I see you're in kangaroo extermination, I think we can sell your waste product
2. I have a reservation at a restaurant you've been whining you can't get into on Facebook for six weeks, next Tuesday. Korean-Ethiopian fusion veggie steak taco burgers on me?

 

PS

try to be less like a character from silicon valley, and more like the cool guy you want to hang out with that you met at the weed shop. jesus

I’m a first-time founder trying to understand the right way to approach angel investors at a very early stage.

For context, I have a live MVP with early signs of demand signals and the main bottleneck now is technical execution. I’m realizing I may need funding to hire or contract someone who can help solve it.

I’m trying to understand how angels usually evaluate this stage and what founders should prepare before reaching out.

For angels or founders who have been through this:

- What should a founder prepare before the first angel conversation?

- Are a live MVP, early demand signals, and a clear technical bottleneck enough for an initial discussion?

- Should incorporation and startup legal paperwork be handled before any serious conversations?

- Where do first-time founders usually find credible angels or warm introductions?

Not asking for funding from this post. I’m mainly trying to understand the process and avoid approaching it the wrong way.

Me and my co-founders are currently working on an AI startup idea that we genuinely feel is very different from what’s already out there. We’re still at a very early stage (idea/seed phase), but after spending a lot of time researching the market, we feel there’s a real opportunity here if executed properly.

Right now, we’re mainly looking for direction, connections, technical guidance, and understanding how founders actually break into the U.S. AI ecosystem. Of course funding matters too, but honestly, at this stage having the right people around us would probably be even more valuable.

Can you anyone help with -

How to connect with VC's ?

Is it possible to reachout companies like Google or open ai for this ?

Appreciate it !

What if it were possible to guarantee that AI agents can’t delete a shopping list, let alone your production database simply because file deletion action isn’t included in the prompt scope?

In the same way, no agent could ever leak your customer database to a third party, even if an employee explicitly instructed it to in a prompt, because external data sharing was never included in the agent’s scope.

What if it were possible to ensure third parties could not overwrite your instructions or hijack your agent neither via malicious file or in person interaction, because your agent is hardwired to accept instructions only from you and treat everything else as data to process while automatically detecting, reporting, and highlighting manipulation attempts?

What if every action your agent takes, along with the exact prompt and user associated with it, is fully recorded and traceable by prompt ID?

Now imagine such a security middleware already exists.

It’s called Sentinel Gateway.

It works across any AI agent framework, can be integrated in under 20 minutes with virtually no impact on your existing stack, allows you to manage multiple agents from a single UI, includes specialized agent templates, and lets you upload document and table templates to structure free-form AI output any way you want.

It even offers a live test demo.

Would you be interested?”