My experience after pitching to an old school VC/angel
I am about to launch my startup and currently is in the seed stage and have a working prototype done. My team just did a pitch an hour ago to this guy, had no high hopes as we've heard various kind of comments about him. We pitched the whole idea, first question asked was about the revenue source, second sentence that came out of his mouth is "do you have a business plan written yet"?
Just after this sentence was launched, I knew exactly that this is the wrong person to talk to. Which top VC's/angels in SV asks for a business plan during a seed stage of your startup (if there is one please let me know, then maybe my perception is wrong)? I get his point that we need to do more market analysis/research on the app, however to actually have a solid well written business plan at this stage is just ridiculous.
With regards to market research, I asked him if we created a website for user to signup, remind them when the product is launched(using service such as launchrock) and showed him we have 500k users signed up, would he be convinced enough in the market of our app? Then he sort of gives an ambiguous answer to it. Again, a ridiculous thought from my point of view. Almost every startup nowadays do use this strategy. I guess he just doesn't notice that.
Point to be made here is that, doing a startup is hard, but it's even harder when you're outside the valley. I know it's all about your effort of you to get connected/network, so you can reach Paul Graham/Dave McClure/Yuri Miler, etc. Some say that if you can't get those connections then you lose already. I don't have any connections with people in SV who can introduce me out to these great angels/VC's and that adds another challenge for me. There is a startup meetup here, but only 5-10 people is in the group and mostly they are just talking about side projects that they have, no one rarely talks about angels/VC's (another dead end for making connections to SV). Was planning to just put up my startup at angel.co and see what happens, don't know whether it's the right time or not. One concern is that most of those investors doesn't invest outside of SV. Would be way much easier if I am at SV, so to new startups out there in SV, be grateful for yourself as you're already one step ahead of us who are outside of SV.
Yet, this is just another confession from a startup founder experience. Feel free to comment