Are you actively fundraising? How has it been?

Much better to self finance. Then you keep full control and direction of the business. You can prevent scummy finance guys from forcing you to break promises you made to customers and employees. And you keep the winnings.

AI startup here ; with revenue, 15% month-on-month growth for an entire year.

Currently raising pre-seed. Have raised from family and friend (singular) a small amount.

So most everybody I'm talking to is basically new to the "how does startup investing work" conversation.

I had high hopes it would be easier and faster than the VC option... It's not really. It's taking forever.

Am considering whether the problem is that I'm not asking big enough... (Our ask is $30k to $150k, aiming to do a $300k round). My initial thought was, let's start with a F&F round and not go the VC route yet. (YC would be great though)

I'm now thinking, maybe we should raise a more traditional VC round with a much bigger ask.

It'll all work out, and it will be a great story for the documentary :)

Two startups I know are rising at the moment, both are doing well, but they are not based in the US and they do not aim to rise billions, their tech teams are lean and they are scaling on sales and marketing.

Raised a preseed and are good to continue from here through next year. Was tough, especially for a hard tech product

Building software in the manufacturing space. It's been hard.

I’m about to start. I’m curious what others experience has been.