A fund has analysts; you have evenings and weekends
A VC fund clearing a deal for diligence can assign an associate to spend a week on customer reference calls, technical review, and market research. A solo angel doing the same work has to be deliberate about which checks actually change the decision, and skip the ones that are thorough but don't move the needle, because there's no team to absorb the hours.
| Area | What a fund typically does | What a solo angel can realistically do |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Technical due diligence, sometimes an outside engineer review | Use the product yourself; ask a technical friend to skim the codebase or architecture, if accessible |
| Traction | Pull and verify usage data directly from analytics tools | Ask for screenshots or a live dashboard walkthrough; sanity-check the numbers against what the founder claims elsewhere |
| Team | Formal reference calls with past managers and co-workers | 2-3 informal reference calls via your own network; LinkedIn history cross-check |
| Financials | Full model review with a dedicated analyst | A single burn/runway sanity check (Lesson 17); skip elaborate modeling this early |
The highest-value checks for the time available
Two checks consistently punch above their time cost: talking to an actual customer or user (not just the founder's summary of what customers think), and running one or two informal reference calls on the founder. Both are things a solo angel can do in an hour or two, and both catch a meaningful share of the problems that formal diligence would otherwise find. Spending disproportionate time on financial modeling at pre-seed, by contrast, produces false precision on numbers that will be wrong regardless of the model's sophistication.
Knowing when you've done enough
Diligence has diminishing returns fast at this stage: the marginal hour spent past a certain point rarely changes the decision, it just delays it. A reasonable target for a solo angel is a few hours total across product, traction, and team checks, not the days or weeks a fund might spend, calibrated to check size, a $10k check simply doesn't justify the same diligence budget as a $150k one.
Checkpoint
- A solo angel has to prioritize the highest-value diligence checks, not replicate a fund's full process.
- Talking to an actual customer and running informal founder reference calls are high-value uses of limited diligence time.
- Diligence effort should scale with check size; a few hours is often enough at pre-seed, not days or weeks.
If anything here still feels unclear, ask before moving to Lesson 14.