This week marks three years since PreSeed Now launched.

We went live on 3 May 2022, which makes Saturday our actual birthday. But today I thought we’d do something equal parts self-indulgent and useful…

Each week, people ask me for more details about PreSeed Now, what it’s done and where it’s going. So I thought I’d write what is hopefully the definitive piece …in the style of a PreSeed Now interview.

I sat myself down, talked to myself, and this is what came out… The weirdest profile I’ve ever written.

We’ll be back with a regular startup profile on Thursday!

– Martin

PreSeed Now meets… PreSeed Now

Early-stage tech startups often want to know how to get featured in the tech media.

The answer is usually ‘raise a notably-sized funding round’. Because a lot of the tech media is focused on the business of tech, it views funding rounds as the first notable milestone worth paying attention to. Before that, you’re usually just unproven by the lack of buy-in from investors.

Aside from that, some early-stage startups might get some coverage in specialist media around their particular field of technology, or they might pay a PR agency to get them some mainstream media attention.

But for the most part, there’s just not that much interest in most really early-stage tech startups from the tech media.

“I can understand why,” says Martin SFP Bryant, founder of PreSeed Now. “Most startups just haven’t done that much that is newsworthy in a conventional sense, so if you cover everything all the way up to Meta and Google, you have more than enough newsworthy activity going on from companies that lots of people within your audience want to read about.”

Noticing the gap for discovering interesting companies at the start of their journeys and exposing them to a larger audience, Bryant launched PreSeed Now at the start of May 2022.

How it works

Built around the simple premise of ‘profiling a different early-stage, UK-based B2B or deep tech startup every Tuesday and Thursday’, PreSeed Now serves an audience of investors, founders, and people who work with startups.

The profiles go into detail, exploring what each startup does in an accessible way, and looking at the founders’ backgrounds and future plans, any funding they have, their vision, competition, and the challenges they face.

“The particular person I have in my mind as I write each profile is a generalist investor who is being exposed to a new startup for the first time,” Bryant explains.

“One important part of the interview process is breaking through the technical terms and marketing gloss founders want to put on their products, to understand exactly how the tech works.

“I always ask: what goes into it, what happens in the middle, and what comes out at the other end? It’s amazing how much more clearly founders tend to explain their tech when you ask them to do that.”

PreSeed Now does not charge startups for coverage.

“I’d be incentivised to write about bad companies if I did that, the incentives would be skewed away from the interests of the readers,” Bryant says.

Having been a tech journalist writing about startups for 16 years, Bryant uses connections across the tech industry as well as cold pitches to source potential startups for coverage.

Filtering them down to the ones that are a good fit for the newsletter is a process that is 50% judgement and 50% intuition, he says:

“I’m not in a position to do the kind of due diligence an investor would do; I don’t ask to look into startups’ bank accounts, for example. But I have to be confident they’re working on something legitimate and have made some progress that takes them beyond purely being a dreamer with an idea.

“And I think I’ve built up a strong enough radar for good founders over the years that I know the startups my readers will be interested in,” Bryant adds.

He says these founders could be experts bringing deep domain knowledge to their first startup; experienced entrepreneurs who bring battle scars and a lot of life lessons to the table, or maybe extremely bright young people with a big idea and a lot of drive.

However, he’s careful not to limit himself to stereotypical ‘good founders’.

“I remember some VCs talking about their strength in ‘pattern matching’ a few years ago, and that always seemed to me like a way to end up with just a bunch of identikit Harvard dropouts in your portfolio,” he says.

“Even if some those Harvard dropouts turned out to build decent companies, what are you missing out on by limiting yourself to a pre-conceived template for success? Sometimes you’ve got to look beyond that and find founders who don’t fit the preset mould. That’s where you sometimes find the most interesting ideas.

“And sometimes it’s the startups I think are a bit of a punt that generate the best response from readers.”

PreSeed Now is partially paywalled, with full versions of all articles, and access to the Startup Tracker database, available to paying subscribers. Ads and sponsorships supplement subscriber revenue. Bryant says typical paying subscribers are VCs and angel investors.

The story so far

Since launch, PreSeed Now has profiled 228 startups and counting. Bryant–a long-time tech journalist who was Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web back in the days when it was battling TechCrunch at the top of the Techmeme leaderboard–writes most of the profiles himself, occasionally getting a freelancer involved.

The most notable startup PreSeed Now featured early in its journey was ElevenLabs, the AI voice cloning startup that has since gone on to become a unicorn and one of the biggest rising names in European tech.

Other notable UK startups covered over the first three years include Trumpet, Versori, Landscape, Exciting Instruments, Literal Labs (née Mignon), and Silveray. But while most of the startups featured over the three years have gone on to raise pre-seed and seed rounds, there’s no sign of a successful exit for any of them yet. Bryant is relaxed about this.

“I think of PreSeed Now as akin to a first-cheque investor. We’ve got to be patient. And we launched at around the same time the 2022 “funding squeeze”, which has since been reframed as ‘the new normal’, kicked in. That means the days of startups with a lightning-quick journey from pre-seed to Series A just aren’t much of a thing at the moment.

“And of course, when it coms to deep tech startups, they need longer periods of R&D before they can prove themselves than the average SaaS product does.”

“But I do think that makes PreSeed Now all the more valuable. We help to make sense of which startups to pay attention to, and why. Readers regularly tell us that they’ve found exciting new opportunities through our profiles. One even said they re-assessed a startup they’d previously dismissed because our profile made more sense than its deck!”

PreSeed Now has mostly been a solo endeavour for Bryant to date. In 2023, he brought in Samantha Deakin to focus on non-content related growth, which among other things led to the development of the Startup Tracker database. But the demands of Deakin’s full-time job led to her stepping away from involvement.

At present, Bryant handles PreSeed Now single-handedly; vetting startups, interviewing them, and writing their profiles.

Funding and the future

Unlike the startups featured in the newsletter, PreSeed Now hasn’t followed a growth path through external investment.

“There’s one reason no-one else has done something like PreSeed Now,” Bryant explains. “There’s not a lot of money in really early-stage startups! I always thought tech media was a strange target for VC funds a few years ago when companies like BuzzFeed and Vox Media raised huge warchests - media companies just don’t have the same scale of exit opportunity as a high-growth tech company.”

That’s not to say he wouldn’t be averse partnering with the right organisation to grow PreSeed Now.

“Some people have told me I should entirely paywall the newsletter and charge VCs four figures a year for access it. But I think there’s a need for talking about what early-stage startups are doing publicly.

“If I came to PreSeed Now solely as a business endeavour and looking to maximise profit, I’d do it very differently. But then it wouldn’t be able to spread the word about pre-seed startups anywhere near as effectively, because all of the information about the startups would be locked away. That was the main problem I set out to solve in the first place.”

While he says he’s happy with PreSeed Now filling a gap in the market–and the ecosystem–as it does right now, Bryant believes one future for the publication could be as part of a larger organisation.

“PreSeed Now could function as the media arm, or an extension of the media arm, for all sorts of tech-focused organisations with a focus on the early-stage world.

“We’ve had acquisition interest in the past, but nothing that made sense to me at the time. The most important thing for me is that whatever happens to it next, PreSeed Now maintains a role in the ecosystem that its readers find valuable, whether they’re investors, founders, or they work with startups.”

Back on Thursday

Well THAT was a weird profile to write. Still, hopefully you found it useful for understanding where this newsletter is coming from and where it’s going. Feel free to drop Martin a line with your thoughts.

Normal service resumes on Thursday, and we have an interesting B2B startup pivot to share with you. See you in your inbox then!