Presenting a project to venture funds.

Yep I getcha - issue is you've inverted the order of operations. The game you're trying to play is reserved for proven founders or senior operators with a track record (there's exceptions to every rule - but as you said, you haven't built a revolutionary piece of technology). At this juncture, what's done is called a "friends and family" round (with your friends and family) to allow you to do what you need to do. Or, you join an incubator and they ideally help you turn this into a commercial-ready product, get some users, and then invest a couple hundred k themselves or intro you to angels who will.

No intent to be an asshole, but my preference is to share stuff publicly because it's more useful to the forum + anyone else who might come along hoping to learn from the thread (I've benefitted from that many times here). My view is we haven't hit that point where your situation is so specific that I need detailed/confidential info to give you advice. This is because it's actually really only about the stage you're at (which you've indicated yourself + dropped clues about, such as you being in school/calling it a project rather than a startup), but give the below some thought, and we can take this offline if it's still, truly, needed.

So, the big question - why would you need financing to acquire users? You shouldn't really in most cases at your stage.

• If you're a B2C or SMB-focused B2B product, you should be figuring out PLG, digital marketing, landing pages, freemium, etc etc. Your CAC should be very low and stay very low as you turn into a company because you're acquiring low-ticket customers. You can start with a landing page and some well-placed ads in the right online communities (reddit, facebook groups, etc) + cold calling to get in front of your customers. Effectively, founder-led sales and cheap experiments. You shouldn't need external capital for this. You probably need advice on execution from a marketing person who could then act as an angel. Try to cold email them or find someone in your network.
• If you're an enterprise or higher-ticket B2B product, I'll start by saying that it seems to me to be incredibly unlikely that you'd have solved a viable problem here as you have simply not encountered these problems in your day-to-day (and who could blame you? You're a student!). If, however, you have solved a real need here - 2 things need to happen: 1) you need to, as above, learn to do founder-led sales, at which you'll have to be elite 2) go into an incubator to get you enterprise-ready - Tech, GTM, Product.
• If you believe capital to be the key to getting users, then you are making a mistake. You need to first do all that stuff yourself (sweat equity) before external capital comes in to scale your unscalable founder-led motion. Capital won't solve the fact that you don't have a (minimum) viable GTM. It might solve, for instance, technical problems if you had a shortage of technical talent. But then I'd say 1) you've indicated you have technical talent and 2) if 1) weren't true, I would say to get a technical co-founder. So, what do you need to do first? As I said, get some users. To do that, establish some sort of basic Product + GTM strategy that is interesting to a very specific audience:
  • Do you know who you serve - your ICP? Is it narrow enough (to start with) that it enables you to actually hone in on that ICP and really get to understand them? (Read some of Greg Isenberg's stuff)
  • Do you solve a real problem for that ICP? Can you tie what your "thing" solves to their pain points in a concrete fashion? Is it a big enough delta that they'd be incentivized to try you out?
  • How does your product solve that for them?
  • Do you have some idea of how to reach them? Have you tried cheaper methods of acquiring customers (Digital, landing pages, community marketing, good old cold outbound, industry events)? Does your business model mean these channels aren't in any way viable?
  • If you're blocked on the prior point, do you have a clear idea of how capital will unlock your ability to reach them?

An incubator will help you solve these questions, btw. And that's what I believe you should do at this point. Like I said, I don't think learning more about your project (and it could be fucking awesome just as you've said btw!) will lead me to give different advice. What you're struggling to answer is why would capital be helpful to you when there have never been more free/cheap options to launch. If you can give an answer to that, then I think there's a different conversation to be had. If your answer is:

• "Need capital to go full-time": Then you should either get capital from friends/family, join an incubator, get more creative (I'd do this one first - just start calling/emailing people + set up a landing page and pay for digital ads), or go get a full-time job to build up some savings so you can do this full-time/on the side while you work.
• "Need capital to hire salespeople": Then you've misunderstood your role - you're the non-technical person, which means your job is sales, product (if your technical people are really only technical) and admin. Search this post from Jason Lemkin - "Dear SaaStr: When Should a Startup Hire its First Sales Person, and What Should Their Profile Look Like?"
• "Don't have a super clear answer, but I just know it's going to help me get users": Then you need to come up with a very clear answer.

Ultimately, my advice is:

• Get busy on productizing your technology. There's a fundamental difference between a product and a technology. Learn GTM (again, go check out SaaStr, Jason Lemkin's website), learn product, and learn the difference I mentioned in the last sentence.
• Get creative on capital needs and GTM. Taking on capital should be the last thing you do. It's harmful to most startups at your stage - you're likely to end up with someone who isn't helpful.
• Go join an incubator - likely very helpful given your inexperience at this stage.
• Go talk to people who've gone 0 to 1 - message a bunch of them and get their advice.

Hope this helps - again, it's a stage question rather than "is this technology inherently useful?" For that question, you should talk to a sector expert or potential customers (do that anyways) as I'm not that audience.