I am a college senior at MIT, starting a startup with my classmate who is also a senior. We have been working on this for about a month and have built some software that is still far from a marketable product. But is useful for our first customer (B2B, so there about ~20 people using the software at that customer), which is offset by the fact that we have heavily customized for their needs in a way that we couldn't afford to do at scale.

Describing the specific idea would dox me, but here is some metadata. We're building the sort of thing that could be described, cynically, as an "llm wrapper" or "b2b saas" product. We have a theory about why this specific product will become more valuable as intelligence becomes cheaper (over a couple more OOM of model improvement, all bets are off in an ASI / takeoff scenario). But this is still firmly a software product. LLMs are pretty core to why it would be a good idea (it would be impossible without them), but we are doing software engineering and not any sort of research or deep-tech.

It's a B2B product for an industry I've worked in before (that's how we got first customer) and think I understand better than most people in tech.

I want to avoid our startup failing. This is so early that the most likely path is to fail before we even get off the ground. Specifically, conditioning on this "failing," I think the most likely explanation is something like the following.

• I chose to keep my high-paid quant role (which I have already signed) after graduating, which kills the project since we stop working on it full time.

• I do this because I was demotivated about our ability to make our thing succeed, enough that the pretty-good quant option seemed better than continuing to fumble around.

• I was demotivated mainly because we lacked any external validation from VCs for our thing being worth trying

  • I felt bad about this at first, though I think it's honest. But I actually think it's reasonable, since getting VCs excited about our thing is kind of necessary to eventually succeed, so their lack of excitement would indicate in the most charitable case that we sucked at this core skill of fundraising and failed to improve at it for months. Which would be good reason to be pessimistic.

• Making this concrete, I would translate "lacked external validation from VCs" to "failed to raise over 100k" (on any terms / from any VCs).
  

I will try to answer any questions about our situation as best I can in a way that doesn't dox me. I'm spending a lot of money for me on making this market because I want to get good information to guide my decisions over the next few months, so I'm very interested in giving people the best context I can so they can bet rationally.