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Comment by e1g | Hacker News Reader

It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.

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> having a social circle to intro investors

> with negligible traction

Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.

"GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.

for 1.5m, any signal is important to build a story. all of the things you list are important, but typically only in later stages.

Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?

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