Closing Your Round =! Product to Market Fit
Monday, June 3, 2013 at 5:05PM Philip Cortes We closed on a 500k seed round in September 2011 for our startup, Meeteor. We closed our round in 3 months, with Tom leading the round, Contour Venture Partners out of NYC doing their first seed round, and a small handful of smaller angel investors in the Bay Area participating. To say that we felt validated is somewhat of an understatement. This is a pretty good approximation of what went through my head, mostly subconsciously:
We must be doing something right! Look at who is giving us money! Look at how much they're giving us! They agree with everything we said! We must be on the right track!
Right? Right…?
Wrong.
I think I subconciously confused closing our round with product-to-market-fit. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was simply a byproduct of the signal we were getting during the latter stages of our fundraising: we had optimized our pitch and deck enough that most meetings were going well. Investors liked our product, they liked our team, they liked our market, and they liked our original take on it all. It's hard not to let that make you feel validated in some way.
You're not validated. Only your product and its numbers tell you whether you've found product to market fit. Are people actually using what you want? If not, how do you get to a place as quickly as possible where people are not only using it, but telling everyone they know about what you've built. Money is a tool, not the finish line.
Your investors bet that you'll GET there, not that you ARE there.
Don't make the same mistake I did. It's easy to when you get to the finish line of seed fundraising.
Get to work :-)
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