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CEO of 21six Group with a passion for business, sport and building first class teams.

Rick Ankers

investment positioning for early stage | dm to say hi

I started as a receptionist at a hotel→ grew to a CEO. left the place to open my first local business in 2013: very niche, we got to product-market fit in less than a year. made enough money to open the first restaurant with it. made all the classical entrepreneurship mistakes. closed the first restaurant → opened the second one. this one worked out. sold as a running business. joined an early-stage startup to help with product and processes → got quite unhappy about how we hire in tech. started an agency on matching the early-stage with their first-ever marketing / growth role. found myself spending more time with founders working on their fundraising positioning than hiring strategies. and that's what I'm doing now at Get Prept → https://get-prept.com/I'm staying in sunny Barcelona till April / May - happy to invite you for a coffee IRL if you're a founder or pre-see / seed investor. 

Leta Lista

it's my job to talk to early-stage investors daily, and here are my notes on what they list as pre-seed and seed red flags: 

1. founder talks about the product, not the business. 
that's how you know you're talking to a first-time founder: 20 mins on the product, 2 mins on unit economics. 
second-time founder: business opportunity and growth.
repeated founders: GTM.

2. no full-time commitment. 
exception: you're keeping your daytime job + building at nights and weekends = have paying customers and early revenue, so a real strong traction signal. 

3. fundraising done by someone who isn’t a founder. 
that's my personal pain of discovery calls - founders are asking how many investors I'll introduce them to, and what the guarantees are they'll invest. being able to raise is a proxy of sales: investors watch you doing just that. 

4. not VC scalable. 
local businesses, serving business model, etc - all great opportunities, but not worth the trouble - bootstrap. 
the benchmark: if your TAM is <$10B, the VC match doesn't work.
(ping me in the comments if you'd like me to explain this part). 

5. fake traction / any other data. 
self-explanatory.

6. org chart as if you're a ser B company.
too many people, too complicated connections, some kind of divisions, etc. you're early, all investors expect to see is a messy WhatsApp group. exception: AI agents. 

7. co-founders never worked together before.
“I worry less about competitors and more about founders driving different directions”. a sanity check: when one founder works on the deck, ask the other one whether there's anything they'd change. 

8. if the founder says ‘huge TAM’ before 'here's who my customer is'. 
tell them who loses sleep over this, and then tell them how many people like that there are = how big the pie is.

and a bonus one, a bit opinionated maybe: “the real red flag? a founder who has no strong opinions. if you don’t disagree with industry norms, why will you win?”


now, there's nothing on "it's not a true innovation" or "the market is already saturated". early on, it's all around the founders - their ethics, velocity, and mental models, and that's exactly what I optimize for.

Leta Lista 

investment positioning for early stage | 3x founder | dm to say hi

first-time founders: 5 most common mistakes made early and how NOT to get into those traps. 

you're early, you've never built a business before, and socials are full of contradictory advice on literally everything - so, where do you even start?

here's what I see all the time when working with pre-seed founders (and that's just fine) + some common-sense ideas on how to approach: 

1. focusing on the strategy, product, branding (could you play with the logo's colours?), and financial projections for the next 5 years. multiple focus = no focus at all. 

the fix: what will bring customers on board? do just that - that's the only reason your startup exists. 

2. "I have to have all the answers" trap. pricing for the customers, reasons to join the early team, and a perfect deck for investors. 

the fix: you're early, you have no data. it's not the answers you're after - it's the conversations that will help to figure those answers out. 

3. "I'm not ready to sell" trap. it usually looks like "I have to update my homepage", "I have to automate the sales funnel", etc. 

the fix: the earlier you fail, the better. and yes, you'll fail in one way or another - the message mismatch, the early value proposition doesn't work, the ICP is wrong. the only way to fix it is to go through the sales process. 

4. "I'll hire someone to do X", and usually it's GTM. yes, you will - at SOME point you'll hire someone (AI agent?) to do the job. but for now, you a) don't have the resources and b) have never done the job, so you won't know whom to look for and what a great candidate looks like.

the fix: would you like to work for someone who has no clue what your job is about? you probably hated it so much that you decided that's been enough. don't become that "someone" for your team - get your hands dirty. 

5. "OpenAI just announced xyz" trap. what's good for OpenAI ≠ what's good for you. it's a huge resource mismatch.

the fix: all those whitepapers and playbooks are useless for the early stage. you now have the privilege of moving fast and making mistakes while unnoticed by anyone - use it well.

ever since I started working with early-stage founders who raise, my popularity score surprisingly went up. 

at friends' dinners, in the gym, at the hairdresser's, on planes and in taxis - everywhere people want to know the same things. 
and the more I talk to them, the more misconceptions / patterns I see. 

if you're raising for the first time, please don't fall for these traps: 

1. raising money is not success - it’s a financing event. round raised doesn't predict your success, and doesn't work as validation. you now have more resources to build with - plan for what's next.

2. talking to investors is not the same as talking to customers. for customers, you product = your value. for investors, your product is only a piece of the business you build. 

3. your previous outcomes are more important than pedigree. exited founders raise faster and easier than ex-Google folks - do something that matters. 

4. investors don't give you money to prove demand. you prove demand, so investors would give you money to scale.

5. nothing is worse than scaling chaos. the early-stage is always chaos. but no customer CRM vs no customer clarity are completely different problems to have. 

6. a warm intro doesn't get you a check, it only gets you a meeting. don't confuse access with conviction, and come prepared.

7. an investor who "loves your space", and "we'd love to stay close" you, is not the investor who will write you a check. get to no faster, your time is valuable.

8. your pitch deck doesn't come first, it comes last - please stop optimizing for it. the moment you have clarity around what it is that you build, and why customers are buying it, you're 30 mins from your ideal pitch deck. 

9. as much as everyone (including me) is talking about traction, the round closes on relations built. traction opens the door, the trust, and "I want to invite this guy over for dinner with my family" closes it.

what am I missing?

here's what I hear from solo founders when asking why they went solo.
(spoiler alert: most of them are second-time founders - they've built with co-founders before).

1. the ‘visionary vs operator’ split only works when both respect the other role. if one founder thinks they’re the brain and the other is ‘just execution,’ this unspoken hierarchy is already broken.

2. different risk tolerance. one wants to bootstrap longer, another one wants to raise and swing big - there's no room for a compromise. every big decision becomes a big fight. agree on the strategy early on. 

3. an equal equity split doesn’t create fairness. 50/50 feels fair on day one, but it rarely feels fair on day 500.
when roles evolve, effort shifts, or one founder becomes the public face, 50/50 starts feeling misaligned, but now the conversation around it gonna be tough.

4. unclear decision rights - consensus sounds mature on paper, but for startups, it often means an operational nightmare. 

5. communication problem ≠ expectations problem.
most founders' splits happen over effort, risk tolerance, or time horizon - not product or marketing decisions. get a proper founder agreement before you start. 

tldr: no matter what you're building, do a proper sit-down with your future co-founder early on, and put all the important bits and pieces on paper. 

no co-founder is better than a mismatching co-founder.

if you want to raise by August (the dead season), you have to start now. 
he's how to structure your prep. 

the raise usually takes 6+ months if the prep work hasn't been done. founders think the pipeline is the hardest part, and then lose opportunities coming unprepared. 

do the prep early → schedule investor meetings in a tight batch → close and get back to building. 

here's the steps to make it work: 

1. map your business out. 
the reason: you spent months and years building it, and you're deeply in the context. people who hear of it for the first time are not.

a checklist: 
+ ICP and their pain points 
+ use cases 
+ existing solutions
+ your differentiators (why your solution is better) 
+ product 
+ alternative / competition (include indirect competition) 
+ category 
+ GTM strategy 
+ business model (how you make money) 
+ unit economics 
+ progress to date 
+ founder-market fit & timing (why you, why now) 

2. get all the assets done and ready to be shared. 
you'll need a deck, a one-pager, a short one-sentence blurb, and a data room. 
nice to have: product demo or trial account and customer feedback.

for the deck, spend 90% of your time on the value and 10% on packaging (design). a black text on the white background = good enough design. 

don't be shy to include slides like: 
- insight (what we know that others don't) 
- what can possibly go wrong and how we'll deal with it
- a few slides on the team and previous outcomes achieved, if you're pre-revenue

3. build investor pipeline. 
warm intros will change the game for you: they don't guarantee the check, but they open the door. here's where to look for them: 
> your angel investors 
> your previous co-workers 
> advisory team 
> your lawyer / accountant - you might be surprised 
> investors who are not a good match (e.g., check size, stage, etc) but can introduce you 
> other founders from your network, especially if they worked with an investor and are happy with their experience
> industry experts you know - they might validate the idea and vouch for you 

a note: please do track the progress with each investor and specifically - what materials you've already shared to understand how much they know about what you build.

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