I speak from my startup's experience. We thought we were a lock for angel funding around 4 months ago. Finally, all the answers came back, "no". We believe i

I speak from my startup's experience. We thought we were a lock for angel funding around 4 months ago. Finally, all the answers came back, "no". We believe it was because it's our first startup, and we did indeed look like the cardboard rocket ship to investors. They loved the cardboard rocket, but weren't about to give us a quarter of a million dollars to turn it into a real rocket. We have since gone through 3 major pivots (possibly 4, depending on how you split it). One of them was to consult in order to bootstrap -- something through which we've learned a lot about our customers. 2 of them were pretty big changes to our core business. Interestingly, our original concept is still the long term goal. Hearing "no" from investors just made us realize that we need to build certain foundations before we can build our mansion of a company. This is likely a consequence of us being overly ambitious at the start of the project.