Is it just me who sees this as backwards? raise money => hire => build? shouldn't you have done something before you raise money, or is this my old-fashioned ideas colliding with the new "growth hacker" startup mentality?
And now you're in the situation where you have put in enough upfront work to have confidence in product-market fit but still choose to raise money and build out an initial team ahead of real revenue / traction.
And it's generally an awful idea for founders: (1) because most assume they will raise a Series-A when statistically they won't and (2) you don't learn to hustle when you have millions in the bank.
The best way is to follow companies like Buildkite. Hustle your way to a few million a year in ARR and then you can reach out to Series A investors on your terms instead of theirs.
$20.2 million in Series A funding at a $145 million valuation [0] is stellar for a bootstrapped company. I'll take this as inspiration for my startup. Of course, it's much harder to build this way, but money breeds complacency, so it's probably best not to look for it.
Do you have experience with the seed/Series-A dynamic?
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/18/melbourne-based-ci-cd-plat...
Having no money is generally an awful idea for founders too.
> most assume they will raise a Series-A when statistically they won't
> The best way [...] Hustle your way to a few million a year in ARR and then
Rather than just highlighting likely failure with just the first approach, I think you need to compare both.
Because statistically they won't succeed at hustling to a few million a year in ARR either.
Having no money might make them even less likely to succeed. (I'm not sure about this though, it would be interesting to see a good study.)