The Rule of 6: Reverse Engineering The (Pre-)Seed Round

1. Working Backwards

(Pre-)Seed investors don’t look at early traction in absolute terms. They work backwards from where you need to be roughly 18 months after the round in order to raise the next round.

Example: To see what this means in practice, imagine I try to raise a SaaS Seed round today. For SaaS today, the revenue benchmark for a Series A is around ~€2M ARR. So that translates into either ~200k at 15% m-o-m growth or 20k at 30% m-o-m growth for a Seed round today.

And that collapses the whole conversation into two variables:

• Your ARR baseline today, and
• How fast & reliably you’re growing.

The baseline is easy. Reliability is the hardest thing for investors to judge. Most early revenue charts look like noise. Is this growth linear or really exponential? Is it driven by a single big customer or actually predictive? And so on.

2. The Rule of 6

A simple heuristic I’ve been using with founders is what I call The Rule of 6:
When you can show six consecutive periods where revenue grows in a consistent way, investors start to look at this as a dependable trend.

The "Time Arbitrage" of Weeks vs. Months Example: If you show investors 2 months of revenue, where Month 2 is solidly growing versus Month 1, it tells them very little. That growth could be seasonality, a lucky contract, or randomness.

To prove it’s a reliable trend using monthly data, you’d need to wait another 4 months and you may not have that luxury of time.

Now if within those first 2 months - you can show 6 consecutive, stable weekly growth data points, that trajectory looks dependable immediately.

Six is roughly the point at which randomness stops being the default explanation. Below six, we’ve all seen too many flukes; above six it becomes harder to fudge or explain it with pure randomness. And of course, if you’re gaming the metric it will break within a few cycles, halfway through the fundraise - so it has to hold.

Obviously weekly, smooth growth curves are hard when you’re selling big-ticket enterprise contracts. But for many companies it is about hitting that 6 consecutive stable weekly growth streak - that will then unlock the ability to raise on traction.

Example: Take the case of Peec.ai. Right after launch, their absolute numbers were still small, but the shape of the week-by-week curve was impossible to misread. After 6 weeks of clockwork-like growth-rate they had closed their first angel ticket and were able to initiate pre-seed discussions which then was signed within weeks. That’s what “reliable” growth looks like.

(Peec.ai Weekly ARR post-launch)

3. A Weekly Drumbeat

This ties back to a well established truth: early-stage companies should operate on a weekly cadence. You cannot just measure revenue weekly; you have to manage it weekly to get the graph to look like this. In my experience, the teams that adopt a weekly drumbeat - looking at their numbers every Friday - without fail - iterate faster, see problems sooner, and just run much faster.

In the case of Peec - the entire team knew from week 1 post launch what the weekly revenue target was. And you could ask anyone on the team at any time of day or night where they stood right now vis-a-vis the current week’s target and they would not only answer but also know what was being done to get there. That’s the power of a strong drumbeat.

Weekly data also forces focus. It eliminates the temptation to over-interpret isolated datapoints. And it makes the Rule of 6 visible - months before the monthly numbers would show anything meaningful.

Putting the pieces together

Pre-seed and seed rounds are never decided by one metric. Strong teams with strong narratives can raise earlier; others need more evidence. But if traction is supposed to carry part of the story, then working backwards, applying the Rule of 6, and running on a weekly drumbeat gives you a far clearer sense of where you actually stand.

If your last six periods point in the same direction for the same reasons, you usually have enough signal to build a fundraise around it.If they don’t, it may be time to shelve the fundraise, laser-focus, keep grinding - until you hit that magical streak of 6 stable consecutive periods of growth.