Seed fundraising for pre-revenue B2B SaaS: metrics investors want

[EricGM]

My co-founder and I have been bootstrapping our B2B SaaS startup for eighteen months, and we've reached a point where we need significant capital to scale our engineering team and launch a full sales push. We're preparing to raise our first institutional seed round, but we're unsure how to best position ourselves in the current tight funding environment. For founders who have recently navigated this, what startup fundraising strategies proved most effective for you beyond just a solid pitch deck? How did you prioritize building relationships with venture capitalists versus angel investors, and what specific metrics or milestones did investors emphasize as non-negotiable before committing, especially for a pre-revenue or early-revenue company in a competitive space?