Chasing the Money: Stop Trying to Raise. Start Trying to Sell

I think a comment below really hit it on the head: "If you spend the same amount of effort chasing paying customers, as you do chasing VCs, you'll be able to pay all your bills and then some with your revenue."

I know some folks who spend years of their life (and more than that, in terms of its physiological and nervous impact, probably) chasing funding. If they just bothered to make small sales and steadily grow revenues - ideally, bt not necessarily recurring - during this period, they wouldn't need funding. And if they wanted it, they could get it on infinitely better terms, not because the VCs really care about how cash flow-positive they are (it's the marketability potential that impacts the valuation on exit in an acquisition, not concrete P/L--that matters more in IPO, which is really not practical for the moment), but because they really are in the position of not actually needing it to survive.

I've often wondered about the sanity of using VC funding as a metric for measuring the success of a start up. If your business is simply developing tech to raise funding, then you're existing in a vacuum. Abraham Lincoln would have made a create start up founder:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights."

"The penniless beginner in the world," he once explained, "labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him." This steady, gradual advance, Lincoln insisted, is "the prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all."

Sage words.