The BS Artists Are Coming For Your Startup
This is what they mean when they say they want to fund you
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I want to give you a little real-world peek at how newly-successful entrepreneurs can pretty easily get tricked into spending their hard-earned revenue under the guise of a phony investment in their startup. I won’t use names because I don’t want to get sued. I’ll just list out the schemes.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost three decades. And in addition to my current “real” job running product at a high-growth, VC-backed startup, I’m also the founder of Teaching Startup, a startup to help startups build and grow better startups. The former, having raised north of $60 million, gets unsolicited investment offers all the time. The latter never got a single one. Until now.
In the last six months or so, an army of bullshit artists have come out of the woodwork wanting to “fund Teaching Startup.” And if you do happen to know anything about Teaching Startup, you’ll find this as funny as I do.
If you don’t, get ready to laugh. Or generally be ambivalent. I don’t know, I’m writing this as I go.
Offers To Fund My “Fake” Startup
Teaching Startup is not a fake startup. It’s very real. It has been making startups better since May 2020. It is sustainable. It is profitable. In fact, the revenue it generates is the magnet the BS artists are drawn to.
But at its core, Teaching Startup is more of a mission. I use it to not only deliver advice to entrepreneurs, but to also show them how I use the advice we’re delivering, in a practical and real-world sense, with real customers and real dollars. But since I’m not 100% bound to its success or failure, it’s definitely a “fake” startup, even though I treat it like a very real startup.
Teaching Startup might eventually be investable. Previous incarnations of Teaching Startup have actually received legitimate unsolicited funding offers. But those were from VCs I knew who also knew me and my track record. Those offers were throwaway bets, a quick parlay that I’d pay off again.
To be honest, I don’t know why I started to get all this phony investment interest. My name popped up somewhere where these folks…
