Raising Our $6.5m Series A – Lessons Learned

That's really interesting and scary. It seems that you can doom yourself quite easily (and unfairly) by just picking early investors who for some reason don't do subsequent rounds. I was a founder at a company that raised a few $ million, from a single fund. Unfortunately there weren't a "top tier" fund and subsequently decided that tech investments in general weren't a good idea for them. We had some interested parties for a next round, but when they didn't invest we also lost all the other parties. Another company funded by the same fund had the exact same situation. Hard lesson learnt: if you don't raise from a top tier VC it could bite you hard!

I estimate you folks probably have on the order of 200k~ users and 10k~ brokers on the platform judging by the numbers of the raise~

No graph, no traction, little future.