Why PreSeed Now is shutting down

When I started PreSeed Now just over four years ago, I set out to fill a gap in the market, offering coverage of really early-stage startups before they reached a stage where the media would usually start to pay attention.

What’s more, I wanted to go deeper than media coverage of early-stage startups tends to go.

Over the past few years I have spoken to hundreds of B2B and deep tech startups from across the UK, profiling as many as I could of the ones I felt were a good fit for PreSeed Now’s audience of investors, founders, and people who work with startups. Oh, and unlike a lot of the UK investment community, we didn’t pass on ElevenLabs 😀

But now it’s time to wind PreSeed Now down.

Why? Read on and I’ll explain why I’ve made this difficult decision.

Firstly, I should say that PreSeed Now has made an impact unlike any I expected…

• Startups raised rounds as a result of being featured in PreSeed Now

• Startups completely reworked their pitches based on how PreSeed Now described them

• Startups hired team members and found commercial partnerships as a result of being featured

• Investors discovered new startups and even took a fresh look at those they’d previously rejected, based on PreSeed Now profiles

• PreSeed Now helped people in VC prepare for job interviews

• PreSeed Now helped people who support startups to understand what’s happening across the UK beyond their local area, and people subscribed from around the world for an idea about what was happening here

• PreSeed Now introduced people who don’t work directly with startups to cutting edge innovation across a wide range of technological fields

• Wherever I go in the UK startup community and beyond, people have warm words to say about PreSeed Now. They tell me it’s a valued part of the ecosystem.

I’m incredibly proud of all of this.

But it’s been exceedingly difficult to keep PreSeed Now going. The simple, cold, hard, reason for this is that it really doesn’t make a lot of money.

Could it make more money? I’m sure it could.

Do I have time to rework the business to make that happen? I do not.

You might have noticed that PreSeed Now has skipped a few publication dates this year. This is something I absolutely hate to do but my life has gone through a lot of changes this year. It’s this the time consumption of ‘personal stuff’ that has caused me to have to occasionally hold issues back.

Don’t worry. I’m fine. It’s just been one of those years in a life where a bunch of big changes happen all at once. Things are looking very good for me now, but the experience has made me take a step back and re-think how I spend my time.

I want to make sure I make the greatest possible impact with whatever I do. As impactful as PreSeed Now is, juggling making money elsewhere with doing the good work for PreSeed Now is a difficult thing, and it’s getting harder as my time is increasingly required in other parts of my professional life.

Over the years, people have suggested all sorts of ways of turning this newsletter into a bigger business. These have often involved things that would have taken the newsletter away from reaching a wide audience.

Maybe someone else would have made it an ultra-private, high-price product for a handful of subscribers, for example. But that just wasn’t in my DNA. Not for this project, anyway.

So what’s next?

As of this week, I’m cancelling all paid subscriptions.

For those of you with annual subscriptions, PreSeed Now will provide a pro-rata refund based on the number of months left until renewal. Please allow two or three weeks for these to be processed so that they’re all properly calculated and accounted for.

Any questions? Email me and I’ll be happy to help.

What’s next for me?

I’ll no doubt share more about my other work in the future (keep an eye on LinkedIn!).

For now, I’d like to thank everyone who has subscribed to, shared, been interviewed for, written for, pitched, or supported this publication in any way.

I’d particularly like to thank Samantha Deakin for working with me on PreSeed Now for a time, and contributing a lot - particularly conceiving and bringing to life the Startup Tracker database, bringing more value to our premium subscribers.

I’d also like to thank Rodolfo Rosini for a 2021 tweet about the need for something like PreSeed Now, which spurred me on to turn an idea I’d had into a real product.

I really need to thank the team at what was The Tech Dept for building the Startup Tracker, too.

And thank you for caring enough (or being curious enough) to read to the end of this newsletter.

If you’d like to speak with me about PreSeed Now, or indeed anything else, my inbox is open.

– Martin