I've created a mobile social discovery app along with my best friend and we're now in the process of gaining users while ramping up for a Series A round. We've already closed a small seed round that helped us get our app out to the App Store, but now it's a matter of getting people to use it and create events on it. It's basically an app that lets you create and advertise experiences and events with others based on simple categories of common interests (nightlife, arts & entertainment, community, etc.). We call it the app that helps you make the friends you didn't know you had.

Now that it's out, and since we're looking for funding in already pretty saturated mobile social media/networking market, what kind of traction to VCs want to see? Is the bar set incredibly high?

We have a revenue model built into this through in-stream native advertising as well. I guess a secondary question is how do we even get users to sign up beyond just word of mouth? We've been approaching musical artists as well to help get the word out but exposure is limited at best, and Facebook advertising is incredibly expensive.

Any thoughts?