Raising pre-seed as a first-time founder is hard (& humbling). Expectations are (or at least feel) high, and advice is often conflicting: - Show you’re a venture-worthy business, but tame your outlandish claims. - Show your wedge, distribution, evidence you can dominate a niche, and how that propels you into the big leagues. - Early traction? Evidence you can ship? - What makes your team exceptional? - Show your GTM but don’t have too many slides, and definitely don’t put too many words on each slide. - Be unique. Be likeable. But most of all, be yourself… All this at a stage where many businesses don’t even have a product yet. The pitch isn’t simple. You need to make micro-adjustments depending on who you’re pitching to, their thesis, and then make more on the fly as the conversation evolves. This is especially true in @Medieval_Tech’s case. We started as a white-label fan engagement application for combat sports leagues, and in less than a year have evolved into a real-time spatial intelligence and human motion data company. We already have a growing product - Cage Calls - live with >5k downloads, 20k predictions and thousands of collectibles in the (self-custodial) hands of @Armored_MMA fans. But that confuses VCs. What exactly are we building? Is this a prediction market or data business? Or something else entirely? Well, it’s sort of all that & more. Every part of our business feeds another. Cage Calls helps combat sports leagues capture their fans. Octopi (our spatial intelligence system that turns multi-agent movement into real-time machine-readable data) unlocks richer, increasingly monetisable experiences - AR/VR/fully immersive broadcast, digital twin gaming assets, real-time sportsbook & prediction market APIs & more. A scaled-down version of Octopi can also be deployed in gyms for real-time training feedback and analytics. This core package is a standalone licensable product. It’s our immediate revenue stream that adds immense value to gyms and leagues, and translates naturally into other sports in the mid-term. How much do we charge? What’s the % rev split? Well, it depends. We have multiple models that allow us to service leagues and gyms at different stages of growth. UFC wants Octopi? Sure - high upfront cost, low (if any) rev split. An emerging league wants Octopi? Sure - lower upfront cost, higher rev split. Octopi’s main value to us is that it captures valuable human motion data. With every deployment, the data compounds. We iterate, our models get better, our market expands - which in turn allows us to absorb more of those upfront costs and deploy into more environments. I believe the data captured by our system is uniquely useful to the humanoid robotics industry, because it’s multi-agent, involves interaction and is competitive and entirely unstaged. Nevertheless, this is a whole new world to me - and whilst my approach was to slowly work our way into that industry, the emergence of robot combat leagues opened that door for us faster than I’d expected. Never one to miss an opportunity, I was able to make contact with some of those leagues, extract simulated Octopi data, retarget it onto a Unitree G1 and deliver it to one of them for evaluation. If it comes back positive, we’ll have our first commercial robotics opportunity before the Octopi MVP has even been deployed. That’s the data business, but the data doesn't exist without the leagues, and the data alone is less interesting to the leagues without packaging it in ways that add value to their businesses. So…we do it all. There’s short, medium and long-term revenue generation, and which one I’m chasing on any given day depends on where the opportunities emerge. All of this is happening 7 days a week, whilst we’re simultaneously trying to package an emerging business into a 30-minute pitch to VCs whose default position is disinterest. Still, as I gain experience raising funds for @Medieval_Tech, I realise it’s all part of the journey. Some days I feel completely insecure, others I’m completely relaxed and know I’m in exactly the right place. What I’m increasingly coming to understand is that all I have to do is keep going. That’s what got us here. The team is in place, the business is emerging, opporunities are arising, and Angels are committing. The right VCs will find us and will know exactly how to add value, and I'm very excited for when that time comes. So, future Medieval Tech investors - if you want to talk more about what we’re building, my DMs are open. Reach out. This post was inspired by @TalokCapital's post on founder vulnerability. Thanks. And to all my fellow first-time founders… Keep going x