Stop Chasing Funding, Start Chasing Sales Want to start a business? Focus less on pitching investors and more on selling to customers.

Too many founders fall into the trap of thinking the key to building a successful company lies in a pitch deck. They spend months refining slides, polishing numbers, rehearsing lines for investors. But none of this matters, if nobody wants to buy what you're selling. All this time spent pitching is time that is not spent selling.

Raising money isn't real validation. It's just fuel. The real test is whether anyone actually cares enough to pay you for your product or service. When you're out there selling, you're learning. Every conversation is instant feedback on what works, what doesn't, what people value and what they'll pay for. It's faster, cheaper and far more honest than anything you'll get from an investor meeting. The market doesn't challenge your hockey-stick shaped financial projections or ask for follow-up slides. It doesn't waste your time; it just tells you, very clearly, yes or no.

When you speak to customers, you're dealing with human beings who are evaluating your offering from a completely different perspective to an investor, and genuinely hoping it will solve their problems. This is a fundamentally different and less intimidating proposition than pitching to a room full of VCs, who spend their days ruthlessly evaluating businesses on a proprietary set of investment criteria.

The typical VC sees hundreds, even thousands of pitches a year, and funds only a handful. Founders often end up tailoring their pitch to please investors, not customers, and take rejection as a sign their idea is bad when it may simply not fit that investor's criteria.

Startups that validate early by selling to customers are far more likely to succeed than those that raise first. According to CB Insights, the major causes of startup failure are running out of cash and a lack of market need. While a VC can arguably solve the first, getting out there and selling to customers can solve both.

Selling early forces focus. It cuts through the noise of ideas and makes you to build something that works in the real world, not just in your head or on a spreadsheet. Once you can sell, raising money becomes a choice, not a necessity. The conversation flips. You're not asking for money to find customers; you're raising to serve more of them.

Investors are drawn to traction anyway. The irony is that nothing helps you raise money faster than proving you don't need it. Show consistent sales, even small ones, and suddenly your story isn't theoretical. It's working. You've already done what most founders are still pitching about.

A pitch deck might open a door. But a customer opens a business. Spend less time trying to convince people with money, and more time convincing people with problems. Because if you can sell, everything else, from funding to hiring to growth, gets easier.

I am not saying raising money is a bad thing, or that it isn't a necessity to get a business off the ground. But if you want true validation, get it from the market by selling something. Then sell more.