133. Pre-Seed Pitch Is The Most Fun - Live In The Vision feat. Neha Govindraj, CEO @ Bonside

Last week, I mentioned this week's guest, Neha from Bonside, and her ability to generate that founder distortion field. She's able to do that. Not only because she's incredibly smart and she has deep domain expertise. But she also ran a process for fundraising. She's going to share some of her tips and tricks with us this week. Take it away Neha.

Hi, I'm Neha Govindraj. I am the Founder and CEO of Bonside Inc. And we provide financing to brick and mortar businesses. Prior to Bon Side, I started my career at Bain, where I worked in the retail and private equity practice. And then after that started a business called Glow Bar here in New York City. And post Glow Bar started Bonside. We raised our pre-seed round, which was 1.1 million, and then our seed round of 3.25 million. And so by the time we launched, we had raised 4.35 million to date. The pre-seed round was a very different fundraising process in that your pre idea, your pre-product, or at least in my case, I was. So in taking on that initial tranche of capital, I was relying on why should you put capital in Neha? And why is Neha thought for bond side, a thought worth exploring? Personally, I think pre-seed pitching is the most fun form of pitching because you really get to live in the vision and the mission and you really get to have your head in the clouds and you really get to dream. As a founder, the more you start doing, almost the harder it becomes to dream or it's, it's almost like you become a little bit more aware of what's in the realm of possibility. And so you start to get a little bit more narrow in that thinking. And I think with pre-seed the vision was so large, it could go in so many directions, it could be such a great business. And I think the pre-seed investor on the other side just had to believe that the founding thought and the initial thought infrastructure was something worth backing. And, you know, who knows whether they believed in, like all the other versions of the world that I was painting with this. But it's just so fun to pitch that way. And so I loved that. I really, really enjoyed pre-seed pitching. I had, I think initially had set out to raise 300 K as part of our pre-seed and ended up raising 1.1 just because it was really enjoyable, just like meeting with different people and telling them about the vision and getting more people bought into it. And really just seeing all of that. And then at a certain point I was like, okay, stop raising and, and gotta get to work.