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Welcome to Cutting Through The Fog.
Each week I share the thinking and frameworks I’ve used (and learned the hard way) to help you build with more clarity, more momentum, and fewer avoidable mistakes.
This week it’s fundraising:
What will be true after this funding round that isn’t true today?
This is one of the most important questions in fundraising.
Because it forces you to answer what investors actually care about.
What difference will this money make?
Not in vague terms.
Not “growth”, “team”, “marketing”. This is fine, but not enough.
In specific, measurable outcomes that move the business to the next level.
Start with this principle
You want to underline that you already have the ingredients to be successful.
Except for the money.
That’s why you’re in the room.
If you give the impression you’re still “working it out”, the response is simple:
Come back when you’re ready.
Build a purposeful shopping list
Before you pitch, you need a “shopping list” of what the funding will pay for.
But not as a set of expenses.
As a set of milestones.
And each milestone should do one thing:
Remove uncertainty. Reduce risk. Increase valuation.
That’s the real progression in an early-stage business.
You don’t magically become valuable because you raised money.
You become valuable because you used the money to prove the things that matter.
The mechanics investors trust
A good funding argument has this shape:
Here are the assumptions in our business plan
Here are the 3-5 assumptions that matter most right now
Here is what this funding round allows us to do to test them
Here is what success looks like (metrics + timeframe)
Here is how that de-risks the business and justifies a higher valuation at the next round (or profitability)
You won’t be able to address every assumption immediately.
That’s not the expectation.
But you must be able to address the foundational assumptions first.
Because later assumptions build on earlier ones.
Early assumptions are about whether the business works at all.
Later assumptions are about growth rates, efficiency, and scale.
Example: New Covent Garden Soup Co
At New Covent Garden Soup Co, we had a sequence of assumptions to prove.
In order:
We had to prove we could make fresh soup on a small scale, and that it would be safe and genuinely “home-made quality”.
We had to prove we could scale that process to industrial scale.
We had to prove unit economics: predictable margin and a model that improved with scale.
We had to prove customers would buy, and crucially, pay a premium.
We launched at £1.10 per carton.
Canned soup was around £0.35.
So we needed evidence the premium brand positioning would hold.We needed to prove it would work in Waitrose (our first national retailer, and much smaller then).
Then we needed to prove it would work in mainstream retail like Tesco and ASDA.
Then we had to prove we could scale in all retailers: a repeatable marketing playbook.
Each time we proved an assumption (or learned it was wrong), we uncovered the next one.
That’s what progress looks like.
Not certainty.
Sequence.
Your milestones should justify the next valuation step
You need to achieve a number of milestones before the next fundraising round.
(Assuming there will be a next round.)
Those milestones are what you will rely on to justify an increase in valuation between now and then.
So don’t talk about “using the money”.
Talk about what will be true once you’ve used it well.
Don’t avoid the money conversation
And one more thing founders often dance around:
Return.
Investors, especially VCs, are in it for the money.
So you need to frame a “return on investment” argument.
That doesn’t mean pretending you know the future.
It means showing you understand the destination.
You should be able to explain:
How value gets created in this business
What the path to exit could look like
Who might buy you, and why
What needs to be true for that to happen
Even if the plan evolves, it signals commercial maturity.
All of this is easy to nod along to in theory.
So, here is a tip that will 100% help you in the future.
A practical tip
Build a relationship with a good boutique corporate finance advisor early.
Not because you’re selling your company tomorrow. You are obviously not.
But because the best exits are engineered over time.
They help you understand value, positioning, buyers, and timing.
And when the moment comes, they help you maximise it.
Final thought
A funding round isn’t “capital to grow”.
It’s capital to prove.
So coming back to the first question I asked you:
What will be true after this funding round that isn’t true today?
If you can answer that clearly, you don’t just sound investable.
You become investible.
