How do you decide between looking for investment or early adopters?

My MVP is ready to go (it's been 3 weeks actually). All this time I've been loosing sleep trying to decide if I should start looking for and organizing early adopters, or organizing a business plan and looking for VCs or angels.

How does one make such a hard decision?

Do you need investment now? The answer to that question is pretty key - if you need investment now then you should consider the VC/Angel route but you will have to give away much higher equity than if you can afford to get some customers on board first, prove your model works and there is a demand and then if/when you need to look for investors later you are in a stronger position to negotiate equity.

So many start-ups want to go the VC/Angel route ASAP without actually needing to do so but all you end up doing is giving away additional equity needlessly so always ask yourself if you truly need the investment before going down that route.

We have built a free B2B Saas offering from scratch to 2500+ active companies growing by around 80 per week currently in just over two years with zero outside investment - it takes a lot of hard work, late nights and commitment but if/when we go for investment we are in a MUCH stronger position than we would have been two years ago so any investors equity will be considerably lower (all be it we still have to monetise the platform so still have a lot of work to do...)

Get early adopters. The kind that will pay for your MVP.

Validation of your product offering will help your fund raising efforts.

The whole idea of doing a minimum viable product (MVP) is so you can test your idea with potential customers. Do not go looking for Angels and definitely don't go after VCs unless you have gained some traction unless you are an entrepreneur with a proven record of previous successes.

Early adopters is definitely what you need.

Good luck!