Hey,

Most people think of raising capital as a difficult and glorified experience.

They have the typical Silicon Valley TV show image of a room full of investors shooting down ideas and grilling founders.

The truth is very different.

You can raise serious money to build your idea, even if you’re a first-time founder with an MVP.

I speak from personal experience, having raised from the following angel investors and VCs:

PSV
Inception Fund
Foundry Ventures
Wave Ventures
Karaoke Capital

Natively even secured investment from the Founder of Candy Crush and a Google employee.

And this was after our MVP failed twice in a row during our first demo.

If you have an idea you think could work, keep reading because I’m going to share what you need to do if you’re serious about raising venture funding for your app idea.

But first, let’s smash a common limiting belief.

It’s not too late. The gold rush of Mobile Apps has only just begun.

Every year, around 160 million people join the internet via mobile devices.

Most people are surprised when I tell them we have way more Indian users than most European countries combined.

The fact isthat the mobile app market is projected to go from USD 252 billion in 2023 to USD 626 billion in 2030.

The question is, are you going to take a piece of the market?

The first thing you need to understand is that 99.9% of all ideas have already been done.

I’ve heard the excuse “my idea has already been done” countless times.

Most of the time, this isn’t a valid reason not to give your idea a shot. There are far more important factors that decide whether an app fails or reaches millions of users.

Take it from me.

When I started pitching to investors, we had a massive challenge with a conflict of interest.

I’d constantly hear “can we even invest in you guys?” because so many VCs had invested in one of our competitors.

It felt like 50% of investors held equity in their company.

That didn’t stop us from raising capital.

Just because competitors exist doesn’t mean investors won’t love your idea.

Think about it like this.

If your idea is part of a trend or wave, it’s impossible that other founders won’t be jumping on it.

This is good because it makes investors more excited.

Having lots of competitors is a sign that there’s serious demand for your idea.

Winners niche down. Losers compete.

Take MyFitnessPal vs MacroFactor.

MyFitnessPal focuses on calorie counting.

MacroFactor brands itself as a behavioral science-based nutrition coach.

Sure, MyFitnessPal has over 100M downloads while MacroFactor has “only” 500K.

But you wouldn’t complain if your app was downloaded 500K+ times, right?

And the best part is that MacroFactor launched 16 years after MyFitnessPal.

You can always maneuver and find an angle to dominate, even if it seems like someone else has taken your idea.

Once you have an initial idea, you need to validate demand fast.

This doesn’t just mean talking to friends and posting in subreddits and communities.

It means building a community around what you’re developing.

For Natively, we have users participate in how we’re building the product via our support channel and Discord.

Not only do we know exactly what to build, but it also means we create a community spirit.

You should do this from day 1. It’s free to start a Discord community and add people who show interest in what you’re building.

Take Lovable.

Before their third launch, they’d have people produce content based on others using their software. In essence, they turned their personal channels into powerful marketing platforms.

There’s nothing stopping you from using your social media channels today to build momentum for your app.

Investors want proof people care about the problem you’re solving.

One easy way to do this is by joining organizations and clubs relevant to your idea.

If you look back at my origin story, I was a part of an organisation called KTH AI society—a student association for developing AI initiatives in Stockholm.

I used to lead a research team, so I got to meet many people who were interested in the space and had good technical ability.

That’s how I met a lot of the people who are involved in my company today.

One of those people was a night owl named Hamed, who was always the last to leave the office.

He came to us one day and had a chat about what we were building and fell in love with our vision.

Without our team members, it would’ve been a struggle to raise funds.

There are dozens of communities in your city filled with people who would love to work on your idea and take it to the next level.

Seed investors don’t need to see a paying user base of thousands.

But they do need to see that your vision is able to attract team members and initial users.

Do you have an idea you want to start building?
We’ve made it easy for you to create an early MVP you can start showing to investors.

In the next post, I’m going to cover doing influencer collaborations, building a mailing list, and other viral marketing hacks to impress investors.

I’m also going to talk about some of the main marketing mistakes I see app founders make when trying to secure investment.