You Don't Have Validation. Here's How to Get It Anyway.

Every investor wants to see validation. Traction. Proof that the market believes your story.

Most early-stage founders don't have any of that. And the instinct is to apologize for it — to say "we're pre-launch" or "we haven't proven the business model yet" and hope the investor doesn't care.

That's the wrong move.

The founders who raise early aren't the ones who wait until they have clean validation. They're the ones who manufacture it. Here are two times we did that at BenchSci.

The paper prototype

In 2016, we were raising our seed round. We hadn't launched our platform. Our team was building the machine learning models we needed to decode biomedical data — we were six months from putting anything in users' hands. But we needed to raise money, so we got creative.

Our goal was simple: show that our solution would actually solve the problem. We hired a freelance designer, paid him $1,000, and spent 20 hours building an initial wireframe of what our platform would look like. We printed it out, rented a car, and spent a week driving across Ontario to 200 research labs.

We met hundreds of scientists, showed them the printed mockup, and asked one question: would this solve your problem? They all said yes. We pre-registered every one of them for when we officially launched.

The slide we put in our deck: "200 labs already signed up to use BenchSci."

That slide was crucial. We didn't have a product. We had a piece of paper and a week of driving. But we had proof — real proof, from real scientists — that the problem was worth solving and that people would use what we were building.

The click-to-vendor calculation

Fifteen months later, we were raising our Series A. By then we had product-market fit — scientists were using BenchSci and finding it valuable. But we hadn't proven the business model. The plan was to build a marketplace around our SaaS offering, but we hadn't launched it yet. No buy button. No transaction data.

Again, we got creative.

Our platform helped scientists decide which antibodies to use for their experiments. On every product page, we had a "click to vendor" button — when a scientist found what they needed, they clicked it to go source the product elsewhere. We didn't sell it ourselves. But we tracked every click.

From the number of times scientists clicked that button, we calculated an "intention to purchase" rate. That let us estimate how much gross merchandise value we would generate if we did have a buy button.

The slide we put in the deck showed projected GMV based on demonstrated purchase intent.

Once again: we didn't have the thing. We had a proxy for the thing. But it was a credible, data-backed proxy — and it was enough.

The lesson from both of these isn't that you should fake traction. It's that validation is never just binary — you have it or you don't. Validation exists on a spectrum, and a founder's job is to find the most credible signal available at their current stage and build a story around it.

VCs know you're early. They're not expecting complete proof. They're evaluating whether you're the kind of founder who can find signal in the noise — who can be resourceful, creative, and honest about what you know and don't know.

Showing up with a paper prototype and 200 pre-registrations tells that story as powerfully as a year of revenue data.

What truly makes the difference isn't what you've accomplished. It's whether you can construct a compelling, credible narrative around where you are right now.