I'm a startup founder, and I raised the entirety, all $500,000 of my pre seed round through my TikTok DMs.

Holdddd up how'd you raise through tiktok I need all the tea I'm a startup founder, and I raised the entirety, all $500,000 of my pre seed round through my TikTok DMs. And I'm getting a lot of questions about it, and I don't know if people are gonna like my answer. I actually know that people aren't gonna like my answer. Guys, I did not do this on purpose. A year ago, I thought I, like, was making my pitch deck, like, ready to go out into venture capital and raise a traditional, like, a normal way. But nothing I have done is traditional. I am non technical, solo, never have done this before. And, you know, I'm building in a new era, so I don't know why I expected my fundraising to be traditional. It's not going out and dming a million people and hoping someone answers like, you can do that. And I, I did spend a little bit of time doing that to, like, no avail. And I think that works for some people. I, that's not my, like, I don't. I feel strange doing that. And I feel like a better use of my energy is to just keep thinking and document my thinking and prove that, like, I can do this, and whoever's gonna see that in me is gonna find me. And that has just been my experience over and over and over again. For some context, about a year ago, I started building my now company. It's called home. It's a meditation app that's Redefining the meditation app category, there is no content library. All meditations are made for you in the moment, based on what you need. A year ago, I set out to do this. I applied to YCombinator. I made a YCombinator pitch video. I said, there's no fucking shot in hell that Combinator's AI screener is going to put me through. So I thought, okay, what do I have to lose from posting it on TikTok? So I put it on TikTok, and by no means did it, like, go mega viral, but it got some views, and it changed my life. You literally never know when you're posting on TikTok. It is like a slot machine. You don't know if two people are gonna see it, if 2,000 people are gonna see it, if 200,000 people or 2 million people are gonna see it. And in those pool of people, you have no idea who's watching that I posted that video. That I posted that video, I saw the effects of, holy shit. Like 90,000 people just watched me pitch. So I just kept posting content and kept going about things the way I thought I should be going about them. But in the process, documenting it and maybe saying things that were my point of view, but maybe a little bit controversial, or just thinking out loud in public. I think it's less so building in public and more so thinking out loud in public. I didn't know, but my now angel investor, Had been. Had been watching me and had had, over time, kind of like, seen a peak under the hood of the way how my brain works. And once he reached out over DMs, like, he already felt like he knew me cause he had been watching my content. And that is like a massive barrier breaker, you know what I mean? Like, when you speak to someone who you've never met, it can take. Especially when there's like, a lot of money involved and a lot of stakes involved there. There there's a lot of like due diligence. But this process really, truly does remove that barrier. If you are able to put yourself out there and speak about whatever you're building or about your point of view in your comfort of your own home to a little tiny black box that. That broadcasts to the world, you are removing a barrier of a stranger getting to know you. And that is the work. So my angel investor dmed me. We got on a call. He was like, I can. I can just tell that you're gonna make it. I like the way you think, and I like what you're building, and I wanna help you. And off to the races. We. He has been truly an angel in every sense of the word.