Hello,

I had a meeting with potential investors today for my newly launched startup, they seemed pretty interested. However I am a bit inexperienced when it comes to valuations and startups, let's say my startup is a consumer based tech platform, within the first month it had 30k registered users and great feedback from users, it won't start generating much money until I start selling ad spaces on the platform. Now the great thing is, I can scale this very rapidly with a low amount of money (customer acquisition cost: 0.017 USD).

I am in the unfortunate situation of having no money myself to invest in this and grow it. I see startups with a mere idea for tech getting hundreds of thousands for 15-20%. Knowing this, I still didn't wanna throw out some magic number and be naively optimistic so I asked for 20% for around 175k for a year of run way which could land 1 million registered users and take development of the platform further.

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They thought this was a high valuation and offered me 50% for the same amount, however they said my 50% shares would be non-diluted in future rounds and in hiring of staff members. Is this a thing? If so, whats the reasoning for an investor to want this.

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So I guess my 2 questions are, is a tech startup with good traction and metrics and high potential to scale undervalued at 350k, also is there such a thing as a founder having non-diluted shares until an exit?