Having a product, a team, and an investment pitch is no longer enough for a startup seeking seed funding. According to Aaron Golbin, co-founder and general partner at LvlUp Ventures, a company’s ability to reach customers, learn quickly, and define a clear scope of work has become no less important than the technology itself.
Golbin presents this analysis as an opinion based on a review of startup applications submitted to his firm. He says his team reviewed more than 2,500 applications during the previous month while writing the article, and approximately 25,000 applications during the past year for the firm’s investment funds and dedicated accelerator programs. Therefore, the percentages cited do not represent an independent market study, but rather the investment firm’s observations of the companies that applied to it.
Funding Is No Longer a Single Path
The author believes that equity financing remains an important tool for building high-growth companies, but it is no longer the only option. Companies with clarity about revenue and return on investment may benefit from non-dilutive capital, particularly when they need to expand their team or infrastructure quickly.
Golbin says his firm provided a company with $1 million in growth capital to meet immediate needs, arguing that raising the amount through equity alone could have taken months and added execution costs for the company. He also says that LvlUp Ventures has begun writing checks of this type almost weekly. This information remains a description of his firm’s practice, not evidence of a broad shift in the funding market.
Distribution Starts Before Product Launch
The central message of the article is that building a better product does not guarantee growth if the company lacks a system for reaching customers. According to the author, distribution channels have become part of startups’ defensible advantage, while postponing consideration of them makes integrating them later more difficult.
Examples he cites include designing products from the outset to operate within existing ecosystems: Shopline applications that benefit from merchant marketplaces, artificial intelligence tools distributed through Slack or Microsoft Teams integrations, and fintech products embedded directly into banks’ and payroll systems’ workflows. In some cases, the route to market may become more valuable than the core product itself, according to Golbin’s assessment.
What Changes in Practice?
Operational speed alone does not constitute a competitive advantage, because most startups operate quickly. Instead of the slogan “move fast,” the author calls for measuring learning speed: How long does the company need to reduce uncertainty and test its assumptions? Execution that produces no new knowledge may turn into costly activity without real progress.
Golbin says the companies most capable of raising funding can describe their business in one sentence and can also identify what they will not do. He considers disciplined focus a factor that affects early customer retention, iteration cycles, and capital utilization. According to the figures he cites from his reviews, approximately 82% of the companies that remained active after one year had a strong foundation for a go-to-market strategy in their investment pitch.
Artificial Intelligence as Operating Infrastructure
The author notes that more than 78% of founders applying to LvlUp Ventures use artificial intelligence in at least one way. However, he warns against treating it as a separate experiment or as a set of tools added to fragmented systems.
He proposes two paths: using rapid prototypes to validate demand and market signals before investing in full development, then designing custom artificial intelligence agents and integrating them into the workflows of companies facing operational complexity and generating revenue. In his view, merely possessing flashy tools is not enough; system design and process clarity may be more important than the tool itself.
Marketing Is Not a Later Stage
Golbin describes marketing execution as one of the biggest differences among startups in their early stages. In his view, marketing should not begin after the product launch, nor should it become a founder’s task supported by a single junior employee. Scalable growth requires a regular process, a clear cadence, accountability, and a team capable of testing strategies and analyzing their results.
The practical rule the author reaches is to test ideas early, measure what actually works, abandon ineffective approaches, and then expand the channels whose results accumulate over time. For the technical reader, the importance of the argument lies in shifting the focus of evaluation from the question “Is the product good?” to a broader set of questions: Can its users be reached? Were distribution channels designed into the product? And does every operating cycle produce actionable learning?