To play devil's advocate here, an investor SHOULD (although apparently few do) want to know about the 'potential' of the company after 500K users have signed up.
For this 'potential', not even the 500K means much. So, to understand this potential, what's an investor to do? One approach is to wait a few years, but then it's too late to invest. So, how can an investor understand in time to write a check to the entrepreneur? If I were writing checks, then I'd want a clear presentation in, say, a 'business plan' of just why the potential after the 500K users was so good.
Next, if I were an investor, I'd want this understanding of the potential after the 500K user BEFORE I wrote the seed stage check and before the 500K users had signed up. That is, I'd want before any checks were written a solid case made, on paper, that this was a good business direction.
I'd want to take that paper with that solid case, after the meeting with the entrepreneur, and study the case, think about it, etc. before deciding to write a check.
Actually, it really is possible to give good descriptions of significant projects just on paper and to do quite well evaluating the projects, again, just on paper. And, the evaluations can be so good that the subsequent execution can be quite reliable, even for leading edge projects. Examples? Well, there is a funder and user of technology. They are by a very wide margin the most important funder and user of high technology in Silicon Valley, the US, the world, and all of history in this solar system. Thankfully for US national security, this user is, yes, the US DoD. Some of their history includes WWII projects in radar, sonar, the proximity fuse, and the atom bomb. Then they did little things like the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, SLBMs, GPS, stealth, the SR-71, the F-22, ARPAnet, aka, the Internet, little things like that. The evaluations were nearly all just on paper, and for approved projects the execution was good with very high reliability.
Evaluating projects on paper instead of just with 500K users can be important. Maybe you met the only VC left in the US ready, willing, and able to evaluate projects just on paper.
For this 'potential', not even the 500K means much. So, to understand this potential, what's an investor to do? One approach is to wait a few years, but then it's too late to invest. So, how can an investor understand in time to write a check to the entrepreneur? If I were writing checks, then I'd want a clear presentation in, say, a 'business plan' of just why the potential after the 500K users was so good.
Next, if I were an investor, I'd want this understanding of the potential after the 500K user BEFORE I wrote the seed stage check and before the 500K users had signed up. That is, I'd want before any checks were written a solid case made, on paper, that this was a good business direction.
I'd want to take that paper with that solid case, after the meeting with the entrepreneur, and study the case, think about it, etc. before deciding to write a check.
Actually, it really is possible to give good descriptions of significant projects just on paper and to do quite well evaluating the projects, again, just on paper. And, the evaluations can be so good that the subsequent execution can be quite reliable, even for leading edge projects. Examples? Well, there is a funder and user of technology. They are by a very wide margin the most important funder and user of high technology in Silicon Valley, the US, the world, and all of history in this solar system. Thankfully for US national security, this user is, yes, the US DoD. Some of their history includes WWII projects in radar, sonar, the proximity fuse, and the atom bomb. Then they did little things like the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, SLBMs, GPS, stealth, the SR-71, the F-22, ARPAnet, aka, the Internet, little things like that. The evaluations were nearly all just on paper, and for approved projects the execution was good with very high reliability.
Evaluating projects on paper instead of just with 500K users can be important. Maybe you met the only VC left in the US ready, willing, and able to evaluate projects just on paper.