Questions beginning with “When should I” or “When do I” (e.g., “When should I search for funding?” or “When do I know I have to pivot?”) may make sense only when you retrace the steps of your story in hindsight. In foresight, they are meaningless.
Because there is no linear relationship between time and progress, time is as bad an indicator of progress in innovating as is weather. And you can really only answer these questions with the Zen-like “when the time is right.
In foresight, the solution is to ignore time altogether and focus instead on preparing for scale. The time will be right when you are ready to learn from resources at the next scale in much the same way you learn from resources at the current scale.
From the book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong by Luis Perez-Breva