Thinking that what works for other companies can works for you. You have to think HARD about your company goals and what you want to achieve, taking “inspiration” from others is just a way to delay.

Stats by themselves show some traction but the matter here is how much time did it take to get there? What is your main metric? Also you should define better the focus of the investment since 500k for 6-8 months seems very high, usually you should think in cycles of 18 months or at least 1 year.

Nah. Experience is way better if you focus on improving the process and a lot better to show than certs.

Sales, sales, sales. At the very beginning the focus of the CEO should be to network, search for investment and close deals (with high emphasis on deals). If you’re non-tech it’s worthless to think about the product itself and focus on actually make the whole thing run.

Adding to the chorus that how you framed it have a lot of red flags for a technica co-founder.

Another one that is still not pointed out is that, if I understood correctly, for your project to be successful you need to onboard “a lot” of users. That it’s not a technical problem and you should be good with a contract dev instead of a techinical cofounder.