My co-founders and I are just starting out and we are looking to build a SaaS solution around GenAI/LLMs, and we are looking to raise pre-seed/seed funding for this effort over the next 2 months. All of us are first time founders and we wanted to get some advice from the community on how to best go about this.

We are trying to pick between the following two options and weighing the pros/cons.

Mock-up: Focus our effort on designing an aesthetically pleasing but non-functional mock-up via Figma or equivalent. Might help us better illustrate our idea than a basic prototype since none of us have much experience with frontends.

Option 2: Build out a working (but basic) and potentially ugly prototype with a working backend. The work that goes into the backend will not be wasted and can probably be reused in the actual development. Will also help us validate technically some finer points behind the idea. But due to our lack of frontend skills, it will probably not impress anybody visually. Also unlikely that we can build out anywhere near our full vision within 2 months so this may not be the best in conveying the idea to investors.

What has been your experience with each of these approaches? Any advice or other approaches we should consider?