Likeness — $1.5M Pre-Seed Budget¶
How $1.5M becomes 18 months¶
A realistic budget for this business is dominated by people, with a non-trivial second line for the legal and compliance work that has to happen before launch, and a third for the compute and infrastructure that scales with usage. Marketing is intentionally minimal — creator acquisition is founder-led and high-touch, not paid.
The budget below assumes:
- Six-person founding team, all taking modest cash compensation
- Phased hiring: four people in month 1, full team by month 4
- US-based, fully remote, no physical office
- 18 months from close of round to seed-ready milestones
- ~11% reserve held for unexpected legal or processor surprises
A note on accuracy: this is a directional pre-seed budget, not a financial model. Real numbers move with the team you actually hire, the processor terms you actually negotiate, and the regulatory environment you actually walk into. The goal here is a plausible shape that an investor can interrogate and a cofounder can reality-check.
The shape of the 18 months — from pre-seed close to a seed-ready state — and the two failure modes that route the company into a bridge round instead:
flowchart LR
Start([Pre-seed close<br/>$1.5M]) --> M1
M1[Months 1-3<br/><b>Foundation</b><br/>4-person team<br/>entity · legal ·<br/>processor BD] --> M2
M2[Months 4-9<br/><b>Concierge launch</b><br/>6-person team<br/>5-10 creators ·<br/>manual training & ops] --> M3
M3[Months 10-15<br/><b>Closed beta</b><br/>real unit economics<br/>scaled moderation] --> M4
M4[Months 16-18<br/><b>Seed prep</b><br/>story · numbers ·<br/>committed cohort] --> Seed([Seed round])
M2 -.->|processor delays<br/>past month 3| Bridge([Bridge round])
M3 -.->|unit econ<br/>doesn't clear| Bridge
style Start fill:#1A1F36,color:#FFF,stroke:#1A1F36
style Seed fill:#15803D,color:#FFF,stroke:#15803D
style Bridge fill:#991B1B,color:#FFF,stroke:#991B1BHiring sequence¶
Hiring all six at once is wasteful. The compliance and legal work has to happen first; the CEO opens fundraising and processor BD conversations from day one; engineering ramps in parallel; trust & safety and creator operations come online when the platform is ready to onboard creators.
| Months | Active team | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | Founding CTO/Product, Founding CEO, Compliance Lead, ML Lead | Foundation: entity, fundraising, processor relationships, model pipeline groundwork |
| 4–18 | + Trust & Safety Lead, Creator Relationships & Ops | Concierge launch through closed beta |
Personnel — $940K (63%)¶
Cash compensation is intentionally modest. Equity is the real compensation. These numbers reflect cofounder-level pay, not market rate, and the budget is fragile to needing to raise them.
| Role | Annual cash | Active months | 18-mo loaded cost (incl. ~22% benefits/taxes) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founding CTO / Product | $60K | 18 | $110K |
| Founding CEO | $110K | 18 | $201K |
| Compliance & Legal Lead | $115K | 18 | $210K |
| ML Lead | $95K | 18 | $174K |
| Trust & Safety Lead | $85K | 15 | $130K |
| Creator Relationships & Ops | $75K | 15 | $115K |
| Total | $940K |
At these numbers you are recruiting people for whom equity, mission, and a seat at the founding table matter more than cash. That is a real recruiting constraint and worth naming. The Compliance & Legal Lead and the Founding CEO are the two roles most exposed to comp pressure — both have specialty profiles (regulatory and fundraising-with-high-risk-processor reps, respectively) where the market rate is roughly double what's budgeted here.
Legal & professional services — $130K (9%)¶
The business cannot launch without this, and corner-cutting here tends to be expensive later.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Entity formation, founder agreements, cap table | $15K |
| Platform terms package (creator agreement, fan terms, AI likeness license, collab release) | $30K |
| Adult industry counsel for processor relationships | $20K |
| AI / likeness rights counsel, ongoing retainer | $25K |
| Trademark filings | $5K |
| Insurance (E&O, cyber, general liability), 18 months | $25K |
| Misc outside counsel time | $10K |
The Compliance & Legal Lead absorbs a meaningful amount of work that would otherwise be outside counsel time, which is part of why that hire is high-priority and high-paid relative to the rest of the team.
Infrastructure & tools — $160K (11%)¶
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Compute for model training and internal R&D | $70K |
| Cloud infrastructure (servers, storage, CDN, queue, monitoring) | $55K |
| Identity verification provider fees | $20K |
| Engineering and ops tooling (GitHub, observability, security, productivity) | $15K |
Consumer-facing inference costs are passed through to fans as compute credits with margin and are not in this budget. Only platform-side compute — training, internal dev, free-tier overhead — sits here.
Compliance & T&S infrastructure — $35K (2%)¶
Separate from legal counsel; these are tools, services, and audits.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 2257 records management system | $10K |
| Content moderation tooling (classifiers, queue management) | $10K |
| Watermarking and perceptual hashing services | $5K |
| External compliance audit before public launch | $10K |
Creator acquisition — $40K (3%)¶
Pre-seed creator acquisition is direct, relational, and cheap. The biggest line is travel and signing incentives for the flagship cohort.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Travel and in-person creator meetings | $15K |
| Early creator signing incentives (~10 flagship creators) | $15K |
| Industry events and conferences | $10K |
Notably absent: paid digital marketing. Creator acquisition at this stage is not amenable to paid channels.
Office / remote — $25K (2%)¶
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Quarterly team retreats (4 × ~$5K) | $20K |
| Misc remote work allowances | $5K |
Reserve — $170K (11%)¶
The honest version of this line: legal or processor surprises in this category can still burn through a meaningful chunk of it in a single bad month. The reserve is a floor, not a guarantee. If a major regulatory or payments shock hits, the company's response is to renegotiate the timeline and likely raise a bridge — not to cover the shock from this budget. At 11% of the raise, this is real breathing room rather than a thin token, but a single severe processor or litigation event can still eat most of it.
Monthly burn, by phase¶
| Phase | Months | Active team | Avg monthly burn | Phase total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation (heavy initial legal) | 1–3 | 4 people | ~$57K | ~$171K |
| Concierge launch (full team, infra ramp) | 4–9 | 6 people | ~$74K | ~$444K |
| Closed beta (full operations) | 10–18 | 6 people | ~$77K | ~$693K |
| Operating subtotal | ~$1,308K | |||
| Reserve | $170K | |||
| Misc / variance | ~$22K | |||
| Total | $1,500K |
Burn is lumpy in months 1–3 (legal and entity-setup heavy) and in any month a major hire onboards, but the steady-state from month 4 forward is roughly $76K/month.
Where this budget is fragile¶
This is the $1.5M version. The $1.2M frame in earlier drafts of this doc assumed a five-person team without a Founding CEO; adding that seat at cofounder-modest cash drove the reserve to roughly zero, so the raise was bumped to $1.5M to keep ~11% reserve. We considered three paths and chose this one deliberately: (1) bump to ~$1.35M and keep a thin reserve, (2) bump to $1.5M for real breathing room, (3) delay the CEO hire to month 4–6 and stay at $1.2M with the founder leading early fundraising. Path (3) defeats the deliberate decision that the CTO/Product founder shouldn't lead fundraising; path (1) leaves no room for a single bad processor or legal month. Path (2) is the honest choice — slightly larger pre-seed ask in exchange for not making the company's first six months contingent on either of those.
There are five places this budget breaks if assumptions slip, and they are worth flagging openly to investors:
-
Cash compensation rises. If recruiting senior compliance, ML, or fundraising-experienced CEO talent at the listed numbers proves impossible, comp goes up and runway shortens. The lever is either a larger raise, fewer people, or a slower hiring sequence. The Compliance & Legal Lead and Founding CEO are the most exposed.
-
Inference costs surprise on the upside. If the concierge phase generates more demand than expected, platform-side compute scales faster than credit revenue offsets it. The mitigation is conservative credit pricing early and disciplined pass-through margin.
-
Legal lumpiness. The $130K legal line assumes no specialty matter blows up — no major regulatory inquiry, no contested takedown, no processor litigation. Any one of those could double the line.
-
Processor onboarding delays. If high-risk payment processor relationships take longer than three months, the launch timeline slips and burn keeps running without revenue. This is the single most likely cause of needing a bridge round before seed.
-
The 18-month target depends on seed-ready milestones. If the closed beta doesn't produce convincing unit economics by month 12, the seed timeline extends and the runway has to stretch — usually through some combination of comp deferral, reduced hiring, and a small bridge.
Reconciliation with the investor deck¶
The use-of-funds chart on slide 12 of the investor deck (35% engineering, 18% compliance & legal, 12% trust & safety ops, 15% model pipeline, 8% infra & security, 12% creator acquisition) was a directional first cut against an earlier $1.2M / five-person frame. It treats "engineering" and "model pipeline" as separate categories rather than what they actually are — most of the personnel cost in different boxes — and over-weights creator acquisition relative to what a real pre-seed budget supports.
The breakdown above is the more honest version, and it is calibrated to the larger $1.5M / six-person team. Before this budget is in front of an investor, the deck slide should be updated to match: a personnel-dominated chart with smaller wedges for legal, infrastructure, compliance tools, creator acquisition, office, and reserve. The story it tells is also better — that the company is a small, focused team doing operationally hard work, not a generic engineering build-out.
Bottom line¶
$1.5M is enough for 18 months at this team size and shape, with real but not lavish reserve. It is not generous; it is honest. The two ways it stops being enough are (a) the team needs to be paid market or near-market and the founders can't accept the equity-heavy version, or (b) something exogenous — regulation, processors, litigation — eats the reserve in a single quarter.
The honest version of the ask, framed for an investor: $1.5M gets the team to a closed beta with measured unit economics, a credible path to a seed round, and enough reserve to absorb a single bad processor or legal month without scrambling for a bridge. $1.2M gets there only by either compressing the team back to five (the founder leading early fundraising they'd rather not lead) or running with a near-zero reserve. Anything north of $1.5M at pre-seed buys nothing the platform actually needs at this stage.