Top Mistakes That Turn Off Early-Stage Investors

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By anggunanastasia03@gmail.com

Top Mistakes That Turn Off Early-Stage Investors

anggunanastasia03@gmail.com

January 4, 2026

Top Mistakes That Turn Off Early-Stage Investors

You have been working day and night creating a product or a service that addresses a genuine issue. You have already considered as a founder how your startup is going to change the future. And you’re confident that any early investor in your startup will see great success. Yet, their lack of interest may stem from Top Mistakes That Turn Off Early-Stage Investors.

You have contacted tens of angel and early stage investors. Some of them have even reacted positively. However, those investors who showed interest in it proposed a ridiculously poor valuation. Why When you avoid special media or even when you find it inconvenient to air out your thoughts publicly, you are telling investors that you are not all that serious. Worse still they can think that you only want to put the feet wet at the expense of their cash and your face will be on the line.

Asking for an unrealistic amount

The thing is not that the existence of the passive founders of the companies, who are in the center of public attention always gives the investors a profit. The thing is that there is less likelihood that they would succeed, especially as viewed by an at-early-stage investor. They might have noble plans about the startup. However, their lack of action in the public is disenabling investors to have high expectations when it comes to their startup.

This kind of founder would move an extra mile in times when the future is uncertain and the setbacks are numerous. This billionaire Mark Cuban has recently been on the podcast Masters of Scale with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. They discussed how Cuban has put money into Twist It Up, which is a start-up company that produces combs used by Afrocentric hair. Cuban, together with another Shark Tank host Daymond John, put up 225,000 in exchange of 25 percent shares in the startup company started by Noel Durity. Hoffman stated in the podcast.

Targeting the wrong investors

They (Cuban and John) did not just invest in his product but in him (Noel Durity). The sharks are not the only people who could see what he had constructed and the level of motivation he had to develop the business. Cuban made a right choice betting on a hungry, hardworking founder who believed strongly in his business. Most of the founders quit when crit times arise. Investors are well aware of this. Those founders who hold strong convictions are the ones who continue to work, continue to appear and continue to make some more progress.

No wonder Twist It Up managed to report an incredible 40 percent upsurge in income in 2020 recession. Your idea might appear mad to most of them when your startup is in a nice research or disruptive industry. It is because the future that you are creating can still not be seen by most people. And you should not be embarrassed to present your crazy ideas even being strange person. Andreessen Horowitz has spearheaded a funding process of $ 23 million in the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, which is an upstart founded in 2015.

Stretching out the process for too long

Since the founding of the so-called Amazon of NFT in December of 2017, the co-founder of OpenSea, Davin Finzer, has been spreading the concepts of the NFT and digital possession everywhere. He has been preaching about the development of the NFT and cryptocurrency world even when his concepts were. bonkers. When you begin to attract attention of a few investors, then, you can be sure that soon you will be on the radar of many investors, which will assist the startup to receive fair and reasonable valuation. As a person whose company is in the early stage of starting up and you want to raise funds.

You would be of great service to you own business by associating with others in the same line as you in your field who are already established. Write on social media about your ideas. Carry out blog posts within your site. Do a list of your niche based news publications and pen articles and opinion columns as an expert contributor to the news publication. Become a speaker on appropriate podcasts to talk about the interesting events in your industry. Whenever you post anything publicly, on Facebook or Instagram, in the press, in the corresponding forums, or anywhere at all, you would.

Conclusion

Be telling the investors that you are confidant in the niche and know it well. You are aware of what you are doing. The company was less than one year old when he was accorded a rock star entrance into a conference in Singapore in 2018. I am referring to the Binance founder Changpeng Zhao who made Binance the largest cryptocurrency brokerage in the world within six months of its inception. He has amassed a huge fan base in the crypto world. Zhao has been unhesitant to show his personal opinions about cryptocurrency regulation and decentralized finance in the future.

He has already become one of the most authoritative experts in the world the media companies can go to in order to get a professional opinion about the novelties. It is hard to capture the attention and the trust of the investors. It is even more difficult to make them interested in your startup, particularly, when your idea seems insane. Your startup can thus fail to receive a good valuation unless they are very enthusiastic. Then you do not want to make already difficult process of convincing investors in your startup even more challenging.

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