How I raised seed funding for my SaaS startup — Building Products [Mischa Sigtermans](https://mischa.sigtermans.me) [ Thoughts ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) [ Books ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/books) [ About ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about) [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) March 4, 2023 · Startup How I secured funding for my startup ==================================== From a €10k angel check with no paperwork to €240k in convertible notes. Every euro I raised for Stagent came through people who already knew me. I didn't set out to raise funding. I set out to build something. [Stagent](https://stagent.com) started as a side project while I was still running [Pixelstart, the web agency I later sold](/thought/why-i-decided-to-sell-my-web-agency). Before that I'd operated a booking agency for DJs, and I'd spent years watching the industry drown in spreadsheets, email chains, and software that hadn't been updated since the mid-2010s. The mental list of things that should exist but didn't had been growing in my head for years. When I finally had room to build it, the whole product fell out of my head in a shape that needed more capital than I had. I didn't have a pitch deck. I didn't have a network of angel investors. What I had was a relationship with someone who'd known me since I was nineteen. The first €10k -------------- Lennert was the first person I'd ever pitched a tech idea to. That was in 2014. I was young, probably naive, and definitely underqualified. He ran a hosting company at the time. He didn't just listen. He gave me infrastructure to make the idea tangible and let me work inside his organization for years. That first project didn't become a massive success. But it built something that turned out to matter more than any pitch deck: a relationship with someone who'd watched me build, fail, learn, and keep going. When I showed Lennert the early mockups of Stagent, the problem it solved, and the market it served, he didn't ask for a business plan. He invested €10k. No formal documentation. No term sheet. No cap table. Just a transfer and a handshake, backed by a decade of watching me work. I'm aware of how lucky that sounds. It was lucky. But the luck wasn't random. Lennert knew exactly who he was backing because he'd seen every version of me over the previous seven years. The €10k wasn't a bet on Stagent. It was a bet on a person, placed by someone who had enough data to make it an informed one. The second check and the business plan -------------------------------------- A second €10k followed not long after, on roughly the same basis. By this point Lennert and I had been talking about Stagent every week. The product was taking shape. The market made sense to him because he'd seen me operate inside the music industry for years. Then the third conversation went differently. He asked questions I didn't have answers for. What's the business model beyond subscriptions? Who are the competitors? What does the financial model look like at 200 customers? At 500? I didn't have a business plan. I'd been building on instinct and user feedback. So I wrote one. I spent weeks on market research, competitive analysis, and financial projections. It was the most useful exercise I'd done since starting the company, not because the plan turned out to be accurate (it wasn't, they never are), but because the process of writing it forced me to articulate things I'd been carrying around as intuitions. The parts I couldn't articulate were the parts I hadn't thought through. That exercise earned €30k. Lennert's total investment reached €50k, and his ownership sat at 10%. What €50k bought ---------------- The money wasn't life-changing in absolute terms. But for a side project turning into a startup, it was the difference between building alone and building with help. I hired the first developer. I invested in marketing that wasn't just me tweeting. The prototype turned into a product that paying customers were using in their actual operations. The money also ran out faster than I expected, which is something every first-time founder says and every first-time founder is surprised by anyway. €50k feels like a lot until you're paying a developer, running infrastructure, and buying the tools a growing SaaS product needs. The runway was short. The pressure was useful. The seed round: €105k in convertible notes ------------------------------------------ By 2021, Stagent had real users and real revenue. Not a lot. But enough that the conversation shifted from 'trust me, this will work' to *'look at what's already working'*. Traction changes every conversation about funding. When you're pre-revenue, investors are betting on a story. When you have users paying monthly, they're betting on a trajectory. The second conversation is shorter. I raised a €105k convertible note round. Convertible notes made the process faster than it would have been with a priced equity round. No months of valuation negotiations. No complex cap table math. The notes converted later at a discount, which gave early investors a reward for their risk without forcing either side to agree on what the company was worth at a stage when nobody really knew. That round eventually expanded to €240k. Every euro came through existing connections or introductions from existing investors. I didn't cold-email a single fund. I didn't attend a single pitch competition. I didn't set up a CRM to track investor leads. I talked about what I was building, constantly, to everyone who'd listen, and the people who were going to invest were the ones who'd already been listening. What I'd do differently ----------------------- Two things. First, clearer equity structures earlier. The handshake-and-a-transfer model worked because Lennert and I trusted each other, but it created complications later when we needed clean documentation for the convertible note round. Get the paperwork right from the first check, even when it feels premature. Especially when it feels premature. Second, I should have been more proactive asking existing investors for introductions. Every investor I had knew other people who invest. I was too focused on building to ask for connections, and that's the one area where the work of fundraising doesn't compete with the work of building. An email introduction takes two minutes and it's the highest-leverage fundraising activity that exists. What stayed true ---------------- The fundamental reality of raising seed funding hasn't changed since I went through it, even though the tools and the vocabulary keep evolving. Build something people want. Talk about it constantly. The people who believe in it will reveal themselves, and they'll almost always be people who already know you or who know someone who knows you. Relationships beat cold outreach. Traction beats pitch decks. Convertible notes beat months of equity negotiations when you're early and moving fast. I didn't raise money by being good at fundraising. I raised money by building a product people could see working and by having spent years around a person who trusted me enough to write the first check without a term sheet. The second part is the part most fundraising advice skips, because you can't hack a decade of relationship-building into a growth strategy. But it's the part that made everything else possible. *thanks for reading* Hi, I'm [Mischa](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). I've been *shipping products* and *building ventures* for over a decade. First exit at 25, second at 30. Now Partner & CPO at [Ryde Ventures](https://ryde.ventures), an AI venture studio in Amsterdam. Currently shipping [Stagent](https://stagent.com) and [Onoma](https://askonoma.com). Based in Hong Kong. I [write](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) about what I learn along the way. [More about me](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). Keep reading: [Opus didn't get worse, you're watching economics in real-time](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/opus-didnt-get-worse). [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) Connect ------- [X](https://x.com/mischamartijn) [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mischasigtermans) [GitHub](https://github.com/mischasigtermans) © 2026 · [RSS](feed:https://mischa.sigtermans.me/feed)