Revenue at the seed stage is too small to be statistically meaningful in isolation. The traction signals that matter at that stage are operational, not financial — and they are routinely missed by diligence frameworks designed for later stages.
We look for three things. First, the time required to onboard the next customer relative to the previous one. Second, the rate at which the founders are forced to rewrite their initial assumptions about the buying centre. Third, the degree to which the product is being used in ways the team did not design for.
Each of these is a more honest measure of fit than the headline ARR number. They also have the property of being legible to operators, even when the financial signal is not.