How to Make Sure Your Competitors Beat You to Your Raise

Something I’ve been hearing a lot from founding teams recently is

“we need more traction before we can raise.”
“investors are telling us they’ll be interested once we have more traction.”

If you get told this, the worst thing that you can do is completely halt your raise and focus entirely on product and your sales and marketing.

In reality, “come back with more traction” is often shorthand for “I don’t believe the story yet” or “You haven’t created enough urgency for me to lean in.”

It’s not about your MRR hitting a magic number - it’s about whether your raise feels inevitable.

And here’s the nuance founders often miss:

Every investor mandate is different.

One group might insist on $1M ARR before they’ll even open the data room, while another is excited to lean in earlier if the narrative, team, or market positioning aligns with their thesis.

What sounds like a dead end from one investor could actually be the sweet spot for another.

That’s why the best founders don’t pause and wait for traction - they use the raise itself to create traction by building investor momentum, stacking early commitments, and showing conviction until belief takes hold.

The rounds that close fastest aren’t the ones with the most revenue; they’re the ones where founders control the narrative and find the right fit, rather than assuming “traction” is a universal prerequisite.

If you stop fundraising to chase traction, you’ve already given your competitors the head start.

The real edge is in doing both - building traction and raising in parallel, so that investor momentum compounds alongside customer momentum.

That’s exactly where our team at Breakout supports founders:

Giving you the infrastructure to keep execution sharp while we drive the investor pipeline with speed and precision.

You handle your customers and traction. We’ll facilitate all convos with the right investors, and make sure your deck and data room are perfect.

Because if you’re waiting, your competitors aren’t.

Hope this helps.

Ryan
Breakout Capital Group

We’re onboarding a handful of new clients into our Q4 Smart Raise sprints right now - historically the best time of the year for investor traction as firms look to deploy before year-end.

If you want to get in while the window is still open, reply and fill out this form here, and we’ll share how we can help compress months of fundraising into weeks.