should you raise money or get customers first? he said we just want clients

last week i taped with a cfa who co-founded a fintech that protects seniors from financial fraud. it watches bank and credit card accounts and flags what doesn't look right.

the origin story is the kind you don't forget. a recruiter told him she had lost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars because her advisor ignored her instruction to move into index funds. that's how it started for him... someone's savings, gone, because nobody was watching.

and it's getting worse. ai voice and video impersonation means a scammer can sound like your grandson. seniors were already the target. now the tools are better.

the show was great. but the debrief is where he said the thing i keep thinking about.

i asked about funding. most founders light up at that question. he didn't.

"right now we're not looking for money. we don't, you know. yeah, we just want clients."

the company is bootstrapped. and his logic was simple. more clients means more resources for product development. fundraising comes later.

most founders asking should i raise money or get customers first treat customers as the fallback. the thing you do while you wait for a term sheet.

he had it the other way round. customers are the plan. capital is what you take once the customers have proved the case.

i think he's right, and here's why.

when you raise before you have customers, you're selling a story. investors price the story with a discount for everything that could go wrong. and you spend months in meetings instead of in front of buyers.

when you get customers first, you're selling evidence. the round, when it comes, is a conversation about how fast, not whether. and you own more of the company at the end of it.

his go to market made it even sharper. he isn't selling to seniors one at a time. he's going after financial advisors, credit unions and community banks. each advisor could bring ten or more customers with them. one relationship, many accounts.

that's the kind of channel that turns a bootstrapped company into an obvious investment. not because he pitched hard. because the numbers did the pitching.

then he summarised what he'd seen in how i work, better than i would have.

"provide intellectual capital of one sort or another to people to get them to pay attention to you before they buy."

that's the whole game. give first. teach, interview, share what you know. by the time someone buys from you, or invests in you, they already know you.

it's the same thing whether the person on the other side is a customer or an investor. nobody wants to be sold. everybody wants to learn something.

now, customers first isn't free. it's slower. you grow at the speed of revenue. and some businesses need capital before they can ship anything at all... hardware, deep tech, anything regulated. for those, you raise.

but most founders i talk to aren't in that bucket. they're raising because it feels like progress. and it isn't progress until someone pays.

there's a quieter benefit too. every client conversation teaches you what the product should be. investors give you money and opinions. customers give you money and the truth. when you finally do sit down with an investor, you're not guessing what the market wants. you're reporting what it already told you, with invoices to back it up.

long term, the founders who get customers first end up with the leverage. they choose their investors instead of chasing them.

if you're getting ready to raise either way, the founder's fundraising checklist is what i'd want you to look at first.

so be honest... are you raising because you need the money, or because you haven't found the customers yet?