Revenue vs fundraising: three questions to keep you on track

When I started building my company, every accelerator, blog post and LinkedIn thread told me the same thing: you have to raise early, raise big, raise often. But the pitching process takes up so much time, and when you know what you want to build, the temptation to lock yourself away and pour every hour into it is hard to resist.

Getting lost in that sauce, on the other hand, can easily starve a company of the capital it needs to move fast enough, or blind you to a market window that won’t stay open while you polish a feature or launch a service nobody in your customer base was asking for. 

I’ve made the wrong choice more times than I’d like to admit. So, from experience, here are three questions I think you should always ask yourself in those initial stages when you’re trying to decide what to do with your (very limited) time.

• How long is my runway? If you have less than six months of runway, fundraising can become a trap. A standard institutional round takes three to six months from first pitch to cash in the bank. If you spend 100% of your time pitching and neglect the product, you’ll run out of cash quickly. If you’re in absolutely- must-raise mode, go for angels early and skip VCs entirely. Optimise for speed via SAFEs or rolling notes from operators who can get the ball rolling quickly.
• Is revenue-chasing reshuffling my roadmap? Relying solely on revenue can quietly start to bend your roadmap, because you end up building hyper-specific features, offering bespoke services, or simply solving new problems just to keep the lights on. It does prove people value the solution enough to open their wallets, however, and no investor deck can fake that. But it’s worth asking whether investment will let you focus on the fundamentals of what you’re building.
• What is the market around me doing? There’s always an external clock ticking alongside the internal one hooked up to your cash reserves. Macroshifts like the AI boom, a legislative change, or a global pandemic can open and close windows in the blink of an eye. Waiting too long in a winner-takes-all market means a better-funded competitor gets there first. Rushing to raise in a fragmented, slow-moving one means giving away equity you never needed to. 

I’ve had to learn that revenue and funding aren’t rivals; rather, they’re just tools that answer different questions, and the job isn’t to pick a side forever. Instead, you just have to keep coming back to those three questions on your runway, your roadmap and your market, and letting the honest answers guide you. 

My frontline data this month

• 📊 Institutional VC calls: 0 (deliberate pause)
• 🔄 Pilot-to-paid conversions: 3
• ⏱️ Average sales cycle length: 42 days
• ☕ Flat whites: substituted for double espressos. Time is ticking

Rita Kastrati - Founder of Pioneering People

Rita Kastrati grew up in and around the hospitality industry, where she watched restaurants and bars struggle with employee shortages. Then, at university, she worked shifts for agencies, and saw a broken system that sold staff short. Now, Rita's reshaping the gig economy on her own terms as the trailblazing Founder and CEO of Pioneering People, a platform that connects businesses with verified workers instantly, while ensuring workers are paid fairly and on the same day.

Pioneering People

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