Raised a little over $1M as a pre seed after getting rejected from YC 3 times. AMA

[yhong]

Title says it all. I could give the spiel of my journey, but figured I’ll just answer any questions

One thing I do want to say is that building a business is really hard. Every day you’ll feel like you are getting you stomach linings ripped out. But you’ll find success you just have to keep pushing. Don’t let a YC rejection deter you. Just because they don’t invest in you doesn’t mean your on to something. Just keep building, selling, and hustling. I’m an idiot. If I can do it, so can all of you

 

[613jono]

@yhong A few red flags about this post. He stated that he raised $1M at a $12M valuation and gave up 12%, which doesn't add up.

If you give up 12% for $1M, then your valuation would be a little bit higher than $8M.

A founder of an AI platform who actually completed a successful fundraising would know that, but I guess a dev shop in Sri Lanka wouldn't

 

[iansek]

@613jono Furthermore he says the company has 400K in annual contracts already. A B2B firm at this stage would have no reason to raise such a small seed round and would be looking for a series A.

 

[tay86]

@iansek yes this is all nonsense. It's like people need post karma or something so this must be an easy goat to points trick that people keep doing.

 

[katiemygirl]

@iansek 400k in contracts does not mean 400k in profit. He may be scaling fast and needs money quick

 

[sweetheart1]

@yhong How did you raise is this via VCs, angel investor, I would love to know about the network

 

[yhong]

@sweetheart1 Yup, I just pinged a ton of people on LinkedIn. If you go on LinkedIn and search up early stage investors, you’ll find a ton. Just ping any and everyone of them.

But again it only makes sense to do this if:
- You have some semblance of a product built
- Traction
- Customers

With cold out reach, I always hit them some message on my company followed with:
- An investor memo (this should be a long document on why your building,what you’re building, why is it relevant, GTM strategy, moat, team, etc
- Website
- Pitchdeck
- Data Room
- The opportunity to line them up with a customer reference

They take this way more seriously

 

[remnant72]

@yhong What kind of traction did you have? MRR and customers? Also is it B2B Saas?

 

[yhong]

@remnant72 $400K in Annual contracts, MRR is a bit of not the right label since some of the payments come in quarterly. 20 customers in total (technically we are still in a bit of a beta). And yes but it’s like AI B2B and I suppose it’s more like developer tooling

 

[holysoul93]

@yhong Wanna know about your company which got rejected by YC yet raised from other investors

Please share link of yours

 

[yhong]

@holysoul93 https://www.saluslabs.ai

 

[pledgerosaparks]

@yhong Thanks for sharing. Wondering what tools/languages you used to build this landing page? I’m new to web dev and looking to learn

 

[yhong]

@pledgerosaparks We just used Wix. We needed the landing page to look mostly nice

 

[yhong]

Don’t try and build out the landing page natively

 

[vividrichard]

@yhong Why would you say this?

 

[yhong]

@vividrichard It’s a lot of time and effort. You should focus on speed if you’re building a start up and anything you can do to talk to customers faster is the route you should take

 

[spatel]

@yhong Did you use a firm to build it?

 

[yhong]

@spatel The Wix website? No, I did that alone. I think I found some template that had most of what we needed.

 

[tanmara]

@yhong We are offering a free trial of Designer As a Service. If you are interested, let me know.
If you guys have your engineering team it's great, else we can also do the development

 

[kethi]

@yhong Looks like a nice tool! Good luck!