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Hi John,

This week's newsletter features actionable strategies from Saba Karim of Techstars on how to gather believable feedback, find interviewees, and prove early traction. Also, read our update on the fundraising marketplace, hear Guy Friedman's story of raising capital for SteadyMD on the Funded podcast, and brush up on your knowledge of GTMF and PLG with a new blog series from Blackbird.vc.

Fundraising during the holiday season

Murtaza Bambot, founder of Heartbeat, advised founders to wait on raising capital until January to avoid the seasonal slump. In response, DocSend's Russ Heddleston laid out historical data around this well-known slowdown and points out that even though 2021 has seen higher fundraising activity than any year we've recorded, the seasonality will likely persist. Here's the full Twitter thread with data.

What are your thoughts on fundraising during the holiday season? Tweet us!

How to gather notable feedback and prove traction even before product

Saba Karim, Global Startup Pipeline Manager, Techstars, is responsible for helping source 450+ startups from across the world that are accepted into its accelerator.

Building a startup is easy, right? All you need is an idea, and the right skills, with related past experience, alongside a strong team, with just the right amount of money, a grand vision, an insane level of perseverance, people open to giving you a shot, and a bit of luck, all at the right time.

OK fine, building a startup is hard. Well, at least about 4,000 people here agree.

That is why I want to spend some time sharing the importance of customer development (also used interchangeably with the terms user discovery and idea validation) – so you don’t waste months or years of your life building something no-one wants.

But first, let’s level-set on the average progress early-stage startups have made on their product at the pre-seed and seed stage. I’ve found that through the years, as the market has become more crowded and therefore competition has increased, expectations of having some sort of MVP earlier and earlier in a company’s lifecycle have become the norm. In fact, according to DocSend’s research, a heavy majority of companies have gone out to fundraise their first official venture-backed round with at least an alpha or beta version of their product.

As a founder, R&D and market research is hopefully what drives you in these early days of building a company. My love for market research came from these books: The Startup Owner’s Manual, The Lean Startup, Running Lean, Sprint, and Hacking Growth. Check them out if you find yourself resonating with the lessons within this blog and want to dig in deeper.

The three strategies I will focus on — in order to gather idea validation and user feedback regardless of the stage that your product is at — are defining the ideal customer profile, investing in customer development, and finding interviewees.

Here is the first strategy out of the three I explain on DocSend's blog:

Pitch Deck Interest Metrics Update

Last week was another record-setting week in the fundraising marketplace. Investor interest slipped 0.36%, while Time Spent per deck fell 2.32%, and Founder Links Created dropped 10.94%. VCs are spending an average of 2 minutes, 31.8 seconds analyzing pitch decks; another all-time low. (retweet our tweet)

Track investors’ hunger for deals and founders’ search for capital on a weekly basis.

Recommended Reads

Startup Marketing from $0 to $100M in ARR (keynote slides & vid)

Jeff Yoshimura, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Synk, breaks down his top marketing tactics that impacted ARR and includes multiple case studies from his time at Snyk, Elastic, and Zuora as they scaled over the years.

Read to the article

WTF is GTMF + PLG?

The team at Blackbird.vc lay out a four part series that dives deep into go-to-market (GTM) and product-led growth (PLG), including foundational principles, models, and case studies.

Read part 1 of the guide

Fundraising Didn’t Just Weather the Pandemic—it Charted the Course to an All-Time High

Based on our data, we look at market influences over the past year, how recent trends compare to previous years, and what the data means for the startup industry.

Read the analysis

Funded Podcast: Catching a Steady Wave

In 2016, Guy Friedman was a successful startup founder with an exit. Most would think that would make raising money for his next company SteadyMD a breeze. Instead, none of his prior investors decided to back him and he was on a familiar grind to getting funding. Fast forward to 2020 and Guy was steadily growing his core business when a wave hit in the form of acceleration towards telemedicine. All of the sudden he was surfing and fundraising became a very very different experience.

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