Meeting an investor for the first time and trying to get them to invest immediately is difficult. They have little information about you or the company. They have no understanding of your trajectory or the company’s. There’s no relationship that’s been built over time.
Investors invest in lines, multiple data points collected over time, rather than a single dot or period in time because it gives them some advantages. They can lower their risk by your idea play out—if the next time they talk to you there is no progress or you fail then that saves them from making a bad investment. If there is progress it gives a brief window into how quickly it will grow.
Read this Twitter thread from from Peter Reinhardt, founder of Segment.
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One way to measure product market fit is to look at the time it takes between putting a product out in the market to the first $1MM in ARR.