€75 MRR, 3 paying customers and 15,000 signups going nowhere. Then a startup pivot changed everything. I sat down with Florian, co-founder of Weavely, on the latest episode of Deal Makers (& Fakers). He walked me through the exact mechanics of raising €900K as a four-person team from Brussels and then going on to raise €1.2M total. He had no warm Silicon Valley network or unicorn hype. Instead, he was just a founder who treated fundraising the way he treated products as a researcher. Methodically. The numbers that forced the pivot: → €75 monthly recurring revenue → 3 paying customers → 15,000 signups, but only 400 monthly actives → Years of building a product that wasn’t working Florian knew he had to kill the product he’d spent years building What happened when Weavely pivoted? → 30% of users were using a Figma design tool for forms → Nobody asked for a form builder, but users were building one anyway → Florian followed the signal instead of ignoring it → That wrong usage became the entire company. They pivoted, rebuilt and raised €1.2M total. What was the capital raising grind that happened behind the scenes? → 60 investor conversations → 15 actual pitches → 3 angels committed → 1 accelerator joined → 1 VC said yes → Team of 4, that’s it The secret of investors’ updates that pushed his raise: → Florian sends quarterly updates to EVERY VC he’s spoken with → Even the ones who said no → Even when the numbers are bad, especially when the numbers are bad His logic: if you only share wins, investors don’t trust you. You need to share the full picture. Pivots, near-shutdowns, ugly months, so when you raise the next round, they already know who you are. It’s like building warm intros who’ve watched you survive. The rejection story that made him close the deal: One VC said the market was too competitive and he had no moat. Florian’s response: “You’re right. The moat is thin. But this team built a product-led growth engine that works. And we’re still here.” That closed the deal. We also went deep into: * How €75 MRR and 3 customers forced Florian to kill the product he’d spent years building, and why that was the best decision he ever made. * How a single Figma conference killed their original direction overnight and the signal hidden in wrong usage that saved the company. * Why 15,000 signups meant nothing when only 400 actually used the product and how vanity metrics almost destroyed them. * The quarterly investor update strategy that pre-warms every future round, even sharing bad numbers, builds more trust than only sharing wins. * Why Florian thinks his own product interface will disappear within 3 years and what that means for every AI-native startup building today. * His take on building in a crowded niche: hundreds of competitors don’t matter if you solve what users actually do, not what you think they should do. * Why a PhD founder deliberately chose speed over perfection: because overthinking is the real startup killer. The market most founders are overlooking: → $700M–$800M in 2026 → Expected to grow to $1.9B by 2035 → AI-native forms and workflows; massive and still early If you’re building in a crowded niche or still trying to educate users instead of listening to them, this episode will change how you think. About Weavely: Weavely is an AI-native platform born from a Figma-based prototyping tool that pivoted after discovering users wanted outcomes, not tools. Now serving users globally with €1.2M raised from European VCs. About Deal Makers (& Fakers) Podcast: Raw, unfiltered founder conversations about startup fundraising. No polished success stories, just brutal truth about raising capital, investor rejections, pitch deck failures, and fundraising strategies that actually work. I’m Niclas, building spectup into a new kind of capital advisory. As VC scouts and private placement deal makers, we connect high-potential companies with the right investors. Reach out → spectup.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dealmakersandfakers.substack.com
