It’s that time of year.

Meetings start to get cancelled in favour of Christmas parties, and startups start to wind down their fundraising efforts for the year, with an eye on the fact that most people are starting to think more about when they finish for Christmas than doing any work.

That’s certainly my experience of UK tech in mid-December, anyway. And I’m sure there are some hyper-productive Americans who would look on that behaviour with disgust.

To be fair, I know some VCs who are busy closing new funds, startups who want to get one last announcement out before the end of the year, and people with lots still on their professional to-do list for the next fortnight.

But there’s a definite ‘end of term’ vibe I’m picking up in the air as of this week.

And so we have something different for you over the next couple of weeks. Next week we’ll be checking in with some of the startups we’ve covered in past year or so to see how they’re getting on. Have they made good progress? Have they pivoted? We’ll find out.

But today, I wanted to reflect on what it’s like to cover super-early-stage startups. It’s definitely different from most other startup reporting. Read on to find out more…

– Martin

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The joy and pain of writing about really early stage startups

You know what made me want to write about early-stage startups in the first place?

Reading the NME as a teenager.

Discovering the hottest new band through a promisingly-worded live review or brief interview to mark the release of their first single gave me addiction to newness. Likewise with that first play of a new band on late-night BBC Radio One shows. There was a thrill to being early to discover something good.

I stumbled upon startup-focused tech media in about 2006 after I installed an RSS reader on my Nokia phone and the recently-launched TechCrunch was a suggested subscription. Again, I quickly got hooked on this world where startups raised money for interesting products I could open in a browser tab and try right away.

A couple of years later, after realising paid blogging might be a good way out of my job with no promotion prospects, I started writing for The Next Web.

The first startup I ever interviewed was a San Francisco-based Y Combinator alum called Heyzap. Yesterday I dug up the brief writeup I did of this company back in 2009, about them bringing micropayments to Flash games (very 2009!).

Sorry for the lack of images on that page; the web of 15 years ago is decaying as servers get moved, data gets lost etc.

Over time, it seems Heyzap raised around $8 million and pivoted a couple of times, into game discovery and then adtech, before being acquired for $45 million by German company RNTS Media in 2016.

Not a bad outcome for the first startup I covered, then. Although I can think of a handful of duds I wouldn’t have covered if I had my time again, I’d like to think that over time I honed my startup radar to a point where the startups I cover are worthy of my readers’ attention.

Why cover startups before they’re noteworthy?

One thing most tech journalists on the startup beat pride themselves on is covering companies that have a reason to be covered - they’ve earned the right to coverage by doing something newsworthy.

Maybe they’ve raised money, maybe they’ve grown really big really fast, or maybe they’ve done something controversial.

I’ve always taken more of an approach inspired by the music journalists and late-night radio DJs of my youth that goes “I think you’ll be interested in this company so I’m telling you about them”. They might not have achieved much yet, but either I think they will or I really hope they will.

And it certainly fills gap in the market. Other tech publications take a punt on an interesting startup from time to time, but they don’t do it week in, week out like PreSeed Now does.

People use PreSeed Now to explore startups they might want to invest in, work for or support, or to simply keep an eye on what else is happening out there beyond their own radar.

Journalism and our ‘duty of care’ to startups

While I suspect most readers don’t really think about this at all, something I’m very careful about is that PreSeed Now isn’t just a regurgitation of a startup’s PR message (if indeed they’ve reached a point where they have one!). I really don’t want to just produce extended ads for companies.

It would be very easy to charge startups to do a glowing piece about them. But instead PreSeed Now doesn’t charge startups and writes independently about them with no copy approval.

Some founders are surprised when I tell them they won’t get to see the article before it’s published, but it really is better for everyone. Readers get something written for them, not for the founders, while the founders get something more valuable than a press release - they get something that I chose to write about them, thus helping to prove to others that they’re worthy of some attention from them too.

I’d place PreSeed Now broadly in the realm of ‘service journalism’. We curate startups for an audience, coming to an independent opinion about them, and providing a service to the early-stage startup world.

While PreSeed Now doesn’t write advertorials, we’re largely positive about the companies we cover, because we’ve already weeded out the ones we don’t think fit the bill to be covered at that point.

Do we go ‘soft’ on the startups we cover? Well we certainly don’t go hard on them, but I’d argue that the ‘going hard’ comes in choosing which startups are a good fit, and which aren’t. Most haven’t reached a point when there’s anything to go hard against, anyway.

The ‘going hard’ also goes on behind the scenes when I drill down deep with founders to really understand what they do and how their product works. A simple explanation of a technical process in one of our articles is often the result of a detailed conversation and additional research to make sure I truly understand what’s going on.

“You explained what we do better than I do!” is a common reaction from founders after the article goes out.

While I’m certainly open to uncovering corruption and wrongdoing in the early-stage startup world if I can stand it up (tip-offs are welcome!), I’d rather just not bring a bad startup to you than waste your time writing about them.

An interesting point comes in the ‘duty of care’ I feel PreSeed Now has to the startups we cover. Covering startups from inception to the point where they’re raising a seed round means covering them at a very delicate stage in their life. While I would never lie about a startup to readers, I will explain to founders the implications of making certain information public.

That means I won’t write about the valuation a startup is raising at, for example. Valuations can be really informative once a tech company is reasonably well established. But a first-time founder raising their first round could screw future fundraising if the ‘plucked out of guesswork’ valuation they’re raising at doesn’t pan out and they have to reduce it later.

But at the same time respect for the reader is absolutely paramount in what we do here. We’re here to bring you the truth.

For example, if I find out that a founder had a dodgy past they had moved beyond, I wouldn’t erase that fact from the article just to make them look good now. Instead, I’d ask them to discuss it in the interview.

The pains of writing about really early-stage startups

As I mentioned above, really early-stage startups are fragile things. And that means plans change.

Here are a few reasons I’ve had to drop or delay articles in the past:

• The founders stop responding to emails for weeks, and then eventually get back to me to explain that since the interview they’ve decided pivot the business into something completely different.

• A founder decides just before we’re about to do an interview that they’re not ready to go public about what they’re doing.

• A university spinout can’t go public about its existence until it gets university approval to do so, but I’ve interviewed them in advance. I could publish before they’re allowed to announce their existence, but if I’ll still have the scoop if I wait, why risk potential inaccuracies in the article by rushing to publish? In one extreme example, university approval came through the night before a piece was due to go out.

• Between doing the interview and the planned publication date, they complete a funding round. While I could still publish the interview as planned, I’ll generally hold back at this point and publish on the day the round is announced. That’s because by this point a PR company has got involved and they’ll only share the funding details if I agree to publish after a certain date and time (normal PR practice).

• We book an interview but the startup dies before we do the interview (hey, they’re really delicate, remember?!).

Focusing on UK startups, I have a good, but not unlimited, pipeline of teams to write about. For some reason, I find examples like the ones above tend to happen in waves - I’ll get a bunch of them in the space of a week every few months, and suddenly what looked like a month’s worth of startup profiles all lined up in the pipe can be cut down to a two or three viable pieces.

I’m generally quite a mellow guy, so if you ever see me looking stressed, that’s probably why!

So what is PreSeed Now looking for?

As you can imagine, all of the above means we’re always looking for startups to feature. A question I’m asked a lot is ‘what exactly do you look for’? So here’s the breakdown:

• Anywhere from inception to raising a seed round

• UK based (or significantly UK focused)

• B2B or deep tech

• Doing something new or unusual

• Credible founder(s) with a reason to be working in the space they’re in

If after all of that, you know a startup who might be a good fit to be covered in 2025, drop me a line.

Back next week

On Tuesday next week we’ll have a look at what some of the startups we’ve covered over the past year have got up to since.

There are some interesting stories to look forward to!