Stop chasing capital and focus on your business

Topic: Growth

An Antler representative told me directly that the firm will invest $260,000 for 12% of a company. It’s a real offer from a serious investor, and for some founders the right move. But run the numbers first.

Take off Antler’s $75,000 program fee and you have $185,000. Say you and a co-founder each pay yourselves $52,000, roughly the national minimum wage. Two wages cost $104,000 and super adds about $12,500, leaving roughly $68,500 for everything else: software, legal, marketing, finding your first customer. It’s real money, but it buys about a year before you’re raising again. And Antler’s follow-on is conditional: up to a third of your next round, but only if you raise at least $300,000 from other investors within 12 months.

I’m writing this for the person with an idea, a title that says founder, and no revenue yet. I co-founded Couchdrop, a B2B file transfer platform, and spent more than five years as its COO.

Everyone is telling you that you’re special

Being a founder has become more of a romanticised identity than a job with real responsibilities. Friends, family and the ecosystem will tell you your idea is great. That leaves you with two distractions that feel like progress: building the shiny thing nobody may want, and finding the funds to build it.

Distraction one: building a feature nobody asked for

Every week there’s a new “AI for x” or an AI dashboard for “y”. Most are a feature looking for a problem. Customers don’t pay for AI. They pay to make a ‘hair on fire’ problem go away. AI is just a method, and methods get copied fast. If your pitch is an AI agent on top of someone else’s product, the next person can do the same, and so can the incumbent who already has the customers.

The failure data points the same way. CB Insights analysed 431 venture-backed startups that shut down since 2023 and could identify reasons for 385. Running out of capital was cited most often (70%), but poor product-market fit came second (43%). Companies can cite more than one reason, and cash problems often sit downstream of a bigger cause. Finding someone who cared enough to pay was the hard part.

Distraction two: the capital treadmill

The playbook was simple: build an MVP, put together a deck and raise. Now nearly everyone is pitching, plenty with decks written by the same AI tools.

Carta’s data shows that of US startups that raised a Series A in Q3 2025, 39% had waited three or more years since their seed, up from 19% in Q3 2019, and that only counts the ones that made it. You raise, spend most of it staying alive, and before long you’re pitching again. Every week spent preparing a raise is a week you’re not talking to customers.

Australia adds another hurdle. Side Stage Ventures and Dealroom’s 2026 report found Australian VC investment was on track for its strongest year since 2022, yet early-stage funding kept declining, and just 18 Australian seed funds completed five or more investments in the preceding year. The capital is there, but the earliest cheques are the hardest to secure.

The Antler 12% is the visible cost. The quieter one is that you’ve started a clock before you know whether your idea works.

The case for raising

Capital has its place, and I’m not anti-investor. Some businesses can’t exist without it: hardware, deep tech, regulated products. The question is whether you’ve earned the right and know how to use it well.

The exit shouldn’t be the reason you exist

A lot of founders raise because the plan is to sell. That’s the venture model: your investors are buying a fast road to a big sale. But an exit is a poor reason to start a company. A business should have a reason to exist that stands on its own: a problem you care about, customers who are better off, a team you’re proud of.

Think about the other path. Build a business that makes $500,000 a year in profit after you and your co-founder are paid a fair salary. Hold that for a decade and it has generated $5 million before tax. You haven’t needed an exit, you still own all of it, and you can still sell if you choose. It isn’t quick, and some businesses can’t be built this way. But you keep control of your company and your time, you work on something you care about with people you chose, and you get to be proud of what you’ve built, whatever happens next.

So where to from here?

If you’re pre-revenue, here’s what I’d do before writing a pitch deck.

1. Find a problem people will pay to fix.

“Build it and they will come” is a fallacy. Find a problem that’s urgent for a specific group of people by talking to them: cold emails, cold calls, or turning up at their offices. Expect rejection and get comfortable being uncomfortable, because that’s the job. Ask about the problem rather than your solution, and talk to a large sample, not three, and especially not your mates. If you pitch in the first five minutes, you’ll hear polite interest, the most dangerous feedback there is. Then test for commitment: ask for a second session, an introduction, real data or a paid pilot.

2. Find people who work, not just comment.

Look for the person who’ll get into the work with you, push back, and deliver what they say they’ll deliver.

3. Don’t hide in work that feels productive.

A financial model, a polished feature or a logo feels good, but ask whether the business grew. Modelling helps when it changes a decision. It’s avoidance when it replaces a conversation.

4. Build something repeatable.

Once people are paying, you need a commercial model that works more than once, a team that can deliver, and operations that hold up as you grow. Know why customers buy and what it costs to win them. Hire when the cost of not hiring is clearly greater than the cost of the hire.

A test before you raise

When you can honestly answer these, a raise starts to make sense:

• What specifically will this money buy, and how will you know it’s paying back?
• Have you won customers more than once, through a process someone else could repeat?
• If the raise took twice as long as planned, would the business survive?

The short version

The ecosystem makes it easy to believe the next step is always a raise. Usually it isn’t. Talk to customers. Get someone paying. Build something repeatable. Then, if you still need capital, raise it knowing exactly what it’s for. If you don’t need it, that’s a good place to be: a business you control, that pays you every year, and exists for a reason you believe in.