Is this idea validation or harmful, good practice or a off on the wrong foot?

What your trying is one approach to finding investors. Here's another that in my experience is far more effective. I'd tap your network, and it's probably actually a lot bigger than you think! Linkedin is the perfect tool for this. Look for people you're connected to, that you trust, and that are suited to helping your business (ideally in your industry, or experienced in fundraising, etc) and that have a good network themselves (ideally they're connected to some investors you're interested in, but not required). Reach out to them, and let them know you're starting a venture, and are looking for their advice, and would love to treat them to a 30 min coffee meeting. People love to hear that others think they're awesome and they love to give advice which makes them feel awesome, and this is someone you know, so chances are they'll accept. Send this request to everyone relevant in your network. At the meeting, tell them about your venture, give them your pitch, hear their comments and heed their feedback, and ask them for 3 people in their network that would be great people to talk to. Get intros to those people, and repeat. If you do this diligently and listen well, your network will expand extremely quickly, and you'll be able to get introduced to literally anyone you want. This is how our founding team at Tachyus acquired our first customer within 1 month of starting, and having no experience or direct connections in our industry. I'm always down to chat in more detail if you're interested. Best of luck!

I think there are great lessons to be learned from Exec. They started out wide, but have gone very deep on cleaning. It depends on the core thesis of your vision. Do you have a different product experience that could be competitive to existing marketplaces? Or are you just going for land-grab? The most important thing to understand about the services marketplace business is that it's a very localized business operation. I believe that if you're just looking to make money, the best way to do this is to go to "secondary markets" and build up marketplaces with a plan to sell to someone who has already raised great VC and has a presence in the major markets. If you are looking to compete in major market cities, then the safer bet is to find the very deep opportunity unless you really believe your customer experience can beat the established players. Happy to talk this through with you in more detail.

Hi, I've worked for years in business to business sales and consulting. You need to find out who works or makes decisions in a company in the area that your potential product could be useful, ie customer service. LinkedIn could be useful for this. Call them on the telephone. Don't e-mail. Open the conversation by asking for help, 'Hi, I'm wondering if you could help me find the person who would be responsible for customer service? I'm looking to get feedback on an innovative new idea I'm considering developing that may be useful to your company.' The most important thing you could ask them during the call is whether they've ever identified the problem that you're proposing to solve as an issue themselves. If they've never noticed, or don't care, then your new product will have a more challenging sales cycle since you'll have to do a lot of education. If they already know they have a problem, you'll need to act quickly because they may be already looking for a solution. Best of luck. David Barnett

The art of the "cold pitch" is definitely something that needs to be worked on, and doesn't come naturally to everyone. A couple of quick tips: 1. 4 is not a big enough target group, you've got to cast a bigger net. Try pitching 20, and aim to get 3-5 responses. 2. When sending a cold email, really think about what you are offering them. Whilst you'll get the odd good egg that simply wants to help - you can't expect entrepreneurs and small biz owners to take time out of their day to answer your questions. To counter, why not tell them you're conducting research in the space, and would be happy to send the finds/reports back to them in a nice format, which could in turn help their business. 3. Don't give up, keep hustling. Try changing around the emails slightly, track which emails convert into responses, and fine tune from there. Good luck and feel free to book a call if you want to chat more. Best James.

If it's SaaS, you should be monetizing from day one. An MVP in SaaS is the minimal product that people will pay for, that's the starting point. You evolved the product from there. If it's a consumer app, that's a little more complicated. Often times, monetizing preemptively can stunt growth and kill the trajectory, due to lack of focus, user experience, etc. It's really a question of access to capital in this scenario.