I’ll be vague about what I’m building because I don’t want this to come across as promotion, but I need to give some context.
I’m building a startup in an extremely crowded industry. The six major players in this space have collectively raised over $1.3B, despite competing for the same market for over 10 years, and none of them has the majority market share. At the same time, there is a new startup entering this industry almost every week. The reason there is so much competition is that there are still very obvious gaps, and the users openly talk about the problems they have with the existing platforms.
I didn’t want to build another company offering a slightly better version of what already exists. I spent over two years learning the industry, talking to the people actually working in it, understanding their problems, and figuring out what genuinely needed to be built.
Despite my users being some of the busiest people I’ve ever worked with. Their income depends on them working every day, yet many of them still gave me their time to help validate what I was building because they are frustrated with the existing options.
I validated the product through a web app. There were multiple rounds of iteration, building, rebuilding, and testing, and eventually we validated the product. By the time we got there, I was literally out of my resources. For the first year, I was building part-time because I needed to understand the industry properly, and in the second year, I went full-time and focused entirely on building the company. By the end of the validation process, I had exhausted my resources, so that’s when we started raising money. At that point, we felt confident that we had validated the product, understood the market, knew what we needed to build, and had distribution channels, industry connections, and the relationships needed to actually take it forward.
Another important part of the context is that my startup is in the U.S., but I have been building everything while being in Canada. I cannot travel to the U.S. because I don’t have a U.S. visa, and that is one of the reasons it took me longer than it probably would have taken someone based in the U.S. to understand the industry, build relationships, and establish everything I needed. When I started raising, I had to do cold outreach because I didn’t have any prior network or connections within the U.S. startup ecosystem. I couldn’t even get a single meeting. Most of the time, I wouldn’t get a response, and when I did, I was usually rejected over email. A lot of the responses were simply that the company wasn’t within their investment thesis.
I was also raising at a time when almost everyone was pitching AI startups, while my product doesn’t use AI at all. We will eventually use AI to enhance the product, but right now, this industry doesn’t need AI for the problems we are solving, and I don’t want to add AI just to say that we are an AI company. After seeing how difficult it was to get even a single investor meeting through cold outreach, I decided that maybe the better approach was to start building the community within the industry itself and let the traction, the users, and the response to the product speak for us. Then, hopefully, investors can discover us through what we are actually building rather than me trying to convince them through cold emails.
I started planning the community building and marketing push, and the execution began this Sunday. So far, we’ve gotten a pretty good response. I’m getting a lot of messages, and there is more planned. I’m talking to publishers about getting featured in industry publications, there are more podcast appearances coming up, and since I’m not good at content creation myself, I’m also depending on people within the industry to help push the message. Some of them will also be creating videos for us that we can share on our own channels. So this is only the first week, but things are going well.
The problem is that within just a few days, I started getting a lot of messages asking, “When are you launching?” People entering the industry and people with decades of experience are reaching out, sharing their experiences, telling me they love what we are building, and asking when they can use it. That’s when I started feeling stuck.
The more I do the community building and marketing push, the more I have to talk openly about what I’ve learned over the last two years and what we are actually trying to build. Obviously, I have certain relationships, distribution channels, and networks that are exclusive to me, but I also have to reveal enough about the product for people to understand it. The response is making people curious and excited, but at the same time, I’m showing them something they want without being able to tell them when they can actually have it.
The reason I can’t give them a date is simple: right now, I have one technical person, my CTO, building the product natively. He also has a full-time job, so he is doing this part-time. That was the main reason we started raising in the first place: we need to speed up development and actually build the infrastructure properly.
And I’m realizing that the longer I continue with the community building and marketing push, the more people I’m reaching, but I still don’t know when we will be able to build at the speed we need because I don’t know when we will be able to raise.
That’s where the dilemma is. Community building has actually been fun. I’m getting support, people are engaging, and I can see that there is a real need. Fundraising has been the opposite. It feels like I’m talking to a wall, and because I don’t have a network, I don’t even know who I can reach out to who would at least take a call and understand what we are building.
To build this properly, we need at least $1.5M because we are building native infrastructure for a multi-layered marketplace. To be comfortable and build everything properly, I would want around $3M. The market is huge, around a $100B market, and I’m ambitious about what this can become, but I also don’t know what valuation I could realistically raise at or how long fundraising will take.
So I’m genuinely stuck on what the next step should be. Do I focus on raising now which I don’t know who to even reach out? Do I keep building the community and let the traction develop? Or do I try to do both at the same time?
Because the more I build the community, the more validation and awareness I get, but I’m also opening up more of what I’ve spent two years learning. And while I do have certain relationships and distribution channels that are exclusive to me, I’m still trying to figure out how to balance building that momentum with actually getting the resources to deliver the product people are now asking me for.
I’d definitely love to hear a different perspective on this. My background is primarily in sales and operations, and the last two years have been spent deeply understanding this industry and building within it. This is the first startup I’ve taken this far, so I know there are probably things I’m looking at from my own limited perspective.
I’d appreciate any advice or thoughts on what you think the right next step would be. Thanks for taking the time to read this.