In the two years I’ve been working with early-stage startups on fundraising and business development, I’ve noticed a question that comes up consistently among founders: Independent of what they’re working on, they ask when it’s time to start raising seed funding.

I understand the impulse. Aside from whatever that money might enable them to do, many founders see their first proper round of funding as validation — of themselves and of their businesses. To be fair, a successful fundraising round is a milestone. But it is not the goal, and founders frequently confuse the milestone for the goal.

Why? I blame the glut of press coverage on fundraising rounds. There are thousands of funding rounds every year and many of them are accompanied by articles blanketed across the major tech news sites. You don’t get the same coverage for filing for a business license or joining a co-working space. Even your first checks — whether from friends or family or from generous angel investors — don’t come with press releases.

“Funding” as a concept is always in the background, and that leads founders to think about it before they even have a product. Before they even have customers. The glamor of VC distracts them from their businesses.

So before we even have a discussion about raising capital from professional investors, focus on your business.

Let’s fast forward. You’ve validated your ideas with generous potential customers, built an early product, and gotten a round or two of feedback from those prospects. The sales conversation is open. You have a product roadmap. You’ve made a lot of progress. But you can see the end of your runway. You want a major cash infusion to hire more developers and a sales or marketing manager. Plus, you want that press to drive more inbound interest and validate — there’s that word again — for your customers that you are here for the long haul.

So it’s time to start drumming up VC interest, right? Here are 3 (non-exhaustive) questions you should ask yourself to kickstart your process.

Do I have a big market opportunity?

I recently saw a pitch deck that highlighted a pain point for its target customers, but this pain cost those customers less than $1 billion annually. That is too small. With few exceptions, VC math requires investors to make bets on huge market opportunities. That means billions or tens of billions of dollars in play. For some funds, it’s even more. Fund size is everything.

That means you need to honestly reckon with your company’s opportunity. That doesn’t mean: “I’m in Category X and it’s an $800 billion market annually that’s ripe for disruption!” They’re not spending $800 billion on your product.

Start from the bottom: Who is your ideal customer? How many of them are out there? What does their cost structure or revenue model look like? That’s the status quo. Now look at how much they spend doing what your product can do for them faster, better, and cheaper. What does that cost structure look like now? How much value are you adding? How much of that value will you capture?

That’s how you get a handle on your real market opportunity.

Do I have revenue coming in?

“Whoa!” you might say. “I’m testing a product and I’m getting great feedback from my customers. But we’re still in beta. It’s not up to my standards. It’s too soon to ask them to pay me.” You need to keep two things in mind.

First, the fundraising environment in the past decade has shifted dramatically. More than half of seed-funded companies have revenue prior to fundraising. That’s up from 9% in 2010 and that trend is accelerating. Revenue is an unmistakable signal of traction. If you do not already have revenue, you are at a disadvantage in the competition for seed funding.

Second, if people are testing your product but are not paying you, you do not have customers. You have users. Very generous users who are graciously helping you develop your product, but they are not paying customers. And the ultimate test for a business is “Will people pay us for this?”

If you’re building a consumer product, I understand the hesitation. But that leads me to the third question.

Do I have growth?

VCs invest in lines, not dots. They want to see lines that go up and to the right. Tell an investor that your app has 50,000 MAUs and they’ll stare at you blankly. Tell them that number has gone up 50% every month for the past three months with virtually no marketing spend and they’ll sit up a little straighter.

This ties back to the first question as well. Investors need to believe that your line can curve upward… and just keep going. Not forever, of course — your projections shouldn’t overtake your market opportunity — but long enough and steep enough for the power of compounding to work its magic on your install base.

Let’s say you answered all three questions with a resounding “Yes!” Time to start pitching, right? Hold on. I have one more big question for you.

So many entrepreneurs, particularly in technology, assume that venture capital is an inevitable step. And if you’re shooting for the moon in a big market with lots of competition — where, so often, the winner will take it all — that may very well be the case.

But go back to that paragraph where I wrote about why you want that VC money in the first place. So often, there are ways to move forward that don’t involve putting together a VC pitch deck. You can offer new hires the equity you aren’t selling to investors. You can tap your network or offer referral bonuses to drive inbound interest. Heck, if you need cash and you’re building something for enterprise customers, paid evaluation periods are extremely common.

And do you remember that word? Validation? You don’t need venture capital to validate yourself or your company. Just take a stroll through the VC graveyard for proof.

Raising venture almost always means signing up for extremely rapid growth and huge external expectations. Does that fit your personality?