[rishabhpoddar]

> When one does not raise money you get questions like "how do we know you will be here in 6 months, how are you funded?". I doubt people will tell you directly "oh, we have seen you are funded we decided to give you a chance".

The thing is, we did raise money, and we still go the same questions, and we replied saying these are the VCs that have funded us, and we still lost those kinds of deals. The deals we won, were mainly cause we solved some burning pain point of that specific user, who really didn't care about our funding status.

> You can raise money to execute (a part of) a larger plans. There are various fields that have barriers to entry in terms of regulation and/or compliance. This can still be couple of FTE + costs before you can sign any deal.

Agreed. But for most startups, people raise cause they need more money to survive.

> This highly depends on the type of business. If you are for example in B2B you can't tell your customer "sorry I can meet only after 19:00 because of my other job" not to mention how you can be perceived.

Agreed. It's not ideal, however if you are solving a big enough pain point for the user, I'm willing to bet they won't mind it.

> make sure the startup has external feedback that you listen to. All founders are quite stubborn - which is good and necessary - and is hard to convince them they need to adjust/pivot/rethink things. Investors can do that, but best is to have some previous experience with the field, otherwise they can be just noise.

Yup, I agree here as well. But, the best external feedback is not from your investors, but from your (potential) customers!!