Unicorns Club 🦄

@ProductHunt featured my article 🧡 Thanks to an amazing editor (hi Jeff 👋), we ended up publishing this piece together about how pre-seed fundraising changed in 2026. The biggest shift of the last few years: AI dramatically reduced the cost and speed of building products. Because of this, many investors now optimize far less for “potential” — and much more for signals: traction, founder velocity, consistency, distribution, retention, and proof that users genuinely care. In the article, I openly talk about what we see inside @UnicornsVC after watching hundreds of founders try to raise funding. I even share some of the traction thresholds and benchmarks investors inside our community increasingly expect to see. You can read it on the Product Hunt Medium blog 👇💬

almost every investor who claims to invest at pre-seed eventually asks me for startups with growing revenue. Some even set the bar at $250–500k ARR. Yes, there are exceptions: – “super founders” – patented breakthroughs – rare deep-tech bets – founders inside privileged circles For ~99% of startups the rule is simple: show revenue — and a few months of growth.