The uncomfortable truth about my next raise: 250k or 500k changes the whole company

The uncomfortable truth about my next raise: 250k or 500k changes the whole company

I just had a quick chat with a business angel that recently approached us and it forced a decision I’ve been postponing: do I raise a small round to buy focus, or a bigger round to buy speed.

On paper, raising more feels safer. In practice, it changes what the company is allowed to be. It changes hiring. It changes burn. It changes the story you have to sell. And it changes how quickly you need to prove that the story is real.

Why the amount of money dictates the narrative

The round size isn’t just a number. It’s a promise.

A 250k raise is a promise of discipline. It says: I’m going to ship, talk to users, learn fast, and earn the right to raise the next round with evidence.

A 500k raise is a promise of pace. It says: I’m going to build and distribute in parallel, take on a bit more burn, and hit a clearer milestone faster.

I circled around the same tension founders always face: you can’t optimize for focus and speed at the same time. You pick the trade-off, then you make the story coherent.

The only fundraising story that works when you’re early

When you don’t have massive traction yet, your job is not to overwhelm people with spreadsheets. It’s to make them feel the inevitability of what you’re building.

Thunder VC puts it bluntly: investing is emotional, and the pitch is about selling a vision people want to be part of. That’s not permission to be vague. It’s a reminder that clarity wins.

So the narrative I’m refining for Notis has to answer three things without rambling.

First, what changed that makes this product possible now.

Second, what’s the specific pain that makes people adopt it even if they’re already “fine” with their current workflow.

Third, why I’m the person to execute this fast.

If I can’t say those three things in one breath, raising more money won’t fix it. It’ll just amplify the mess.

The Notion paradox: using the tool people already live in, without becoming it

We also talked about the role Notion plays in Notis.

Notion is a cheat code and a risk at the same time.

It’s a cheat code because it removes adoption friction. People already have their tasks, projects, notes, and operating system in there. If Notis shows up inside that existing system and behaves like an AI intern, the value is immediate.

It’s a risk because if the story becomes “we’re a Notion add-on”, you inherit Notion’s constraints in the investor’s head.

The framing that feels right is this: Notion is the interim surface that lets us ship and learn faster, while we eliminate the friction that actually blocks execution. The product is the reduction of friction, not the container.

If we do this well, the distribution advantage of Notion becomes a launchpad, not a ceiling.

What I’d actually spend the money on

The conversation got specific about burn, and I like that. Money only matters as a function of what it unlocks.

The two hires that keep coming back are simple.

A chief engineer profile who can push the product forward with real velocity and clean execution.

A GTM profile who can turn early value into repeatable acquisition and feedback loops.

Those two roles map to the only thing that matters pre-seed: build something people love, then prove you can reach them efficiently.

The rest is noise.

The “Interaction” example and the temptation of the big pre-launch raise

I asked that angel to to look into how a San Francisco company called Interaction raised a massive round before launch (30 million at a 150 million valuation if I’m not wrong).

It’s a useful reference point, not because I want to copy it, but because it reveals what investors pay for when there’s no revenue. They pay for a team they believe can win, and a narrative that makes the product feel inevitable.

Hemant Taneja’s write-up around Interaction’s approach is instructive: the pitch is anchored on reducing cognitive overload while preserving context, which is basically a crisp, human problem statement in modern AI clothing.

There’s also a warning embedded in these stories. A big early round can be a gift, but it can also turn the company into a machine that has to justify its valuation before it has earned product truth.

The plan from here

I’m treating this as a sequencing problem.

First, tighten the pitch into a two or three sentence narrative that makes the raise size feel obvious, not negotiable.

Then, use Notion as our fastest path to real user value while making sure the product story is about friction removal, not the platform we sit on.

Then, pick the round size that matches the milestone we can hit with high probability.

If you’re raising right now and feeling the same tension, you’re not alone. The hard part isn’t the number. The hard part is committing to the version of the company that number implies.