Just posted this in another thread, but I’ll edit:

Are you trying for Seed or early stage? Make sure you know if you really want VC money- it’s a dance with the devil.

Usually pre Seed and Seed is friends and family, and people you know or have worked with that believe in your idea and give you enough money to incorporate, get a cap table together, prototype, wireframe, do some dilligence, patent for hardware or really brilliant software and find the right people to execute.

Early stage is for when that seed money is going to exhaust and you need money to scale. Hardware kind of changes that, because you have design and production. Early stage may change timeline for prototype and production. Production and distribution can take a ton of money.

For VC investment you generally need:

1) your total addressable market and sales economics projections worked out. Your company incorporated, cap table and your early execution team identified.

2) you need a pitch deck, This needs to show why you need VC money and how and who is going to execute on returning that money 10x (or whatever the projections for the TAM are- could be part of a 1B market segement).

And as you’ve found out, you need to pitch a bunch of them. I’ve never pitched VC, but I’ve done several VC investments and VC funded startups as an early employee. I’ve founded a couple companies as well- but we were not VC funded. I’ve never done hardware, mostly software/services.

As a VC investor, I probably invest in one in 20 companies and those are well past the initial pitch stages. And frankly they are usually already referred by people I know that are successful (and have some investment). So even if they don’t want in, they maybe able to refer you to the right people.

You can read up on this stuff. I recommend Venture Deals to understand the basic process, and something like Hard thing about Hard Things to stay motivated and figure out what you are getting into. I’m clearly biased to the Bay Area VC scene, but it is what I know.