I’m a solo founder and somehow ended up getting a $100K commitment from a VC off one deck and a short meeting.
No MVP, no traction, nothing fancy. Just a deck and… me. Honestly still a little surprised.
For context, I’ve been running a video/animation studio for about a decade.
Something like 5,000 projects over the years.
So most of my life has basically been explaining complex stuff with visuals and dealing with every type of client you can imagine.
Now I’m working on a prompt-to-video tool that spits out full explainer videos from a single prompt.
It feels like the natural evolution of the work I’ve been doing forever.
The interesting part is what I think actually made the VC take me seriously this early:
• I know the problem way too well.
Clients think they know what video they need, but after thousands of projects you start predicting their real pain points before they even mention them.
I think the VC saw that I wasn’t guessing - I’ve been solving the same problems manually for a decade.
• I understand the market because I lived in it.
When you’ve quoted, negotiated, and delivered thousands of videos, you end up with a pretty realistic sense of who buys, when they buy, and where the money actually comes from.
VCs don’t need you to “research the market” when you’ve already been operating inside it for 10 years.
• I have direct access to customers.
I don’t need to run ads or cold outreach to find people to validate ideas. I can DM a few founders or marketers and get unfiltered feedback in minutes.
Investors love when you already have a built-in feedback loop because it means faster iteration and fewer wrong turns.
• I know the competition from the inside.
Not from reading comparison charts… from literally competing with them for years.
That gives you a much better sense of where the real gaps are versus what competitors say they offer.
• I’m actually a builder.
I’ve been coding since I was a kid and running a studio forced me to develop operational discipline.
So instead of “great idea but can you execute?” the meeting became “ok, he’ll actually build this stuff.”
Basically, none of this felt forced.
This is the kind of product I’d be building even if no one funded it, and I think the VC could feel that.
It wasn’t a random idea I picked off a list - it was just the next logical step in a career I already lived, and I think that was the key.
Don't try to force an idea. Focus on finding problems you already know inside and out, and VCs will appreciate that.
Curious if anyone else here also raised early based mostly on a deck?