BC STARTUPS
Saved by @Jacobtldr

What I learned from raising my first seed round.

This isn’t a how-to guide, that may come later. This is just a story and observations from my own experience.

See, I didn’t know what I was doing at all...

 We had a built a prototype, people seemed to like it. Investors seemed to like it. Not because I showed it to them, I wouldn’t know how to do that.

But I got a lot of inbound asking about the product and found myself stumbling into meetings with people with no real goal.
We decided it was time to raise and I had to figure out how to do that.

I’m not from SF. I’m from small town Missouri. I didn’t have connections.

But I did spend a lot of time making internet friends. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. In particular friends in @genzmafia
It was here I had some help from @nhuebecker on the first pitch deck I ever made. It went a long way btw - Thanks nick!

And met a lot of connected people thanks to @ItzSuds. He also got me on clubhouse.

In there I started talking to people and met @YousifAstar
Yousif taught me the game. I cannot stress this enough he taught me everything. Pitching, materials, intros, down to the verbiage of my emails.

He taught me how to be intentional with raising instead of stumbling into meetings.

I blocked off two weeks and got started.
1. You want to make a CRM of all your potential investors.

2. You want to find people to get intros to these investors

3. Schedule all your meetings in a 2 week window

4. Pitch your heart out. And remember it’s about your story and your team more than your numbers

5. Close!
I’ll have to make another thread about this in detail. Theres so many nuances... I remember getting intro emails and not even knowing how to respond to them. I had to ask what to say.

Though one person also deserves a lot of credit in this story and that’s Sahil..
I sent @shl a cold email. He didn’t care about intros and he didn’t care about status.

He just liked what we were building and believed that we could make it. He was our first big check in.
Sahil then helped us fill the rest of the round. He had to teach me how to make a blurb. Thanks to his help and everything I learned from Yousif the round came together in 24 hours.

In fact, it doubled.
Things snowballed. Every new commitment led to more intros and before I knew it we had double the commitments ($4m) from the $2m we wanted to raise.

This all happened in 24 hours and was very overwhelming... See, now I had to learn to tell people no.
It felt weird turning down money. But that money is expensive. If we had taken these deals we would have diluted ourselves more than 30% in a seed round.

Additionally you now have to pick your partners. Who do you want by your side for life? Don’t rush these decisions.
10-15% dilution is EXCELLENT
15-20% dilution is Good
20-25% dilution is Okay
25% + dilution is Bad

We ended up only taking 1.5 of the 4
When choosing partners pick people who have the strongest conviction. Pick people who you can be yourself with. Pick people who will genuinely help you.

And avoid any red flags like the plague. Regardless of how much money they want to give you.

They will be with you for life!
Then when its all over you’ll realize that was easier than you thought and that what comes next is much harder.

Hiring, Organizing, Managing, Shipping is much much much harder than raising.

But I know from the other side raising can look like a big mountain to pass.
I can’t fit all the details in a thread but if you’re raising or want to raise I would love to help you the best I can! Just send me a DM and we can talk more.

We can go over investors, pitch, materials, or even the little nuances like what to say in emails 😆
In closing it was fun to learn how to play the game and I would love to teach others.

I’d also recommend anyone to reach out to those mentioned in the thread as they are incredibly founder friendly.
And a big thank you to everyone else who has helped us along the way. I would have to make a very long thread to mention you all, but you know who you are!

I’m incredibly humbled and grateful for all that you’ve done 🙏

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2/ Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but have been less successful services. It's bc services are complex, subjective, fragmented, and often in real life. Makes it hard

3/ There's been 4 major eras at making the service economy work online. The Listings Era, the unbundled Craiglist era, the Uber for X era, and the Managed Marketplace era


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5/ The problem is, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. The techniques that got us to here won't get us to the next phase. So we have to do some pretty different things. That's why "Managed Marketplaces" have been a big deal - hire folks as W-2s, certify quality, etc.
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@ksaitor
The Beatles wrote “Yesterday” in less than a minute.

Led Zeppelin wrote “Rock And Roll” in 30 minutes.

The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”, 10 min during a soundcheck.

The Rolling Stones, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, 40min.

Making a startup in 24 hours is perfectly fine.


I worked on my first startup for 2.5years. It was an events app. Sunk in cost and expectations were so high, that I had to close it, despite getting consistent revenue.

In comparison, I wrote @CryptoJobsList in 2 days. And it's way more meaningful than what I've been doing in my events startup for 2.5 years.

When I let go of my engineering ego and let go of expectations that I need to raise capital and hustle for 4+ years — I started lauching fast and interating fast without any expectations — then I started coming up with something truly meaningful and useful ✨

12 startups in 12 months by @levelsio
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Michael King \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
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Ever notice how the top niches are centered around health, wealth, and relationships?

There's a deep-rooted psychological (and biological) reason why.

And today, I'm gonna to explain all of it so you can start profiting off of this knowledge 💰💰

*Now, this thread is going to be long and in depth. Make sure to favorite the top tweet now so you can come back to it later.

So. Down to the very core of every living being (humans, dolphins, bacteria, aliens), there are only two drivers:
1. To survive
2. To reproduce

Right off the bat, we know that sex is a primary driver to human behavior.

This would also mean that each gender has its own insecurities regarding sex.

Men have a subconscious fear that their woman will leave them for someone more successful

Women have a fear that their man will leave them for someone younger & better-looking

We can conclude that men are attracted to looks, and women are attracted to status.

This is human nature down to its very core.

Crazy, blue-haired feminists will try to argue and say otherwise.

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@jdnoc
This is the blueprint I've followed to build my own business/income in ~4 years. This is how I learned to make websites + apps, learned SEO, learned how to write well, and how to grow my SaaS product.

👇

Get your time right by eliminating most entertainment and leisure.

Produce (work) more than you consume (watch/read/listen to entertainment).

Work intentionally, have fun intentionally, create a balance that you control. Free up a few (3-4) hours a day.

Use that new time to build new skills + knowledge by doing work for free for other people.

Do free work that helps save them time, make them money, or save them money (things that people will pay for).

Do a bit every day. Because it's free, there's less pressure to perform

Enhance learning by purchasing courses, reading books, and taking action to learn those skills by applying them to the free work you're doing.

Figure out what you like to do and what you don't like to do (do more of what you like to do and less of what you don't).

Figure out what works and what doesn't work (there's definitely a lot of advice out there that doesn't work or is contextual to the environment it works in).
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Justin Kan
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@justinkan
With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

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