Hi, I'm Christian

Introductions
#1

Background

After spending many years being a developer for others a couple of us got together and did an angel funded start-up in '07 for a B2B/B2E SaaS product in the vendor management/contingent workforce space. We sold the company to a UK company in '11 and our “handcuffs” came off a couple of months ago so 2 of us moved on.

We started another angel funded start-up, this time in the B2C space with a family-oriented product. Company is 3 weeks old and we’re still in the designing phase. Looking forward to kicking the coding part into high gear soon.

Why am I here?

Even with a full plate of the current start-up I have a couple of ideas that I think would work as smaller scale bootstrapped products. So I’m here to soak up as much knowledge about “micro ISVs” (kinda miss that term) that I can from all ya’ll. I casually lurked back in the Business of Software days and followed the blogs of a couple of people from there/here but didn’t bring myself to make the jump.

Glad to see a gathering place of like minds resurrected.

#2

Hi Christian. Welcome to the forum.

Did you find the angel round so beneficial to the initial startup of the company in your first venture that you decided to do it again the second time around, or was there another reason for repeating the same process?

#3

Obvious benefit was more start-up capital so we could bring a couple of people on board sooner. We’re in the rolling hills of CT with semi-retired wealthy guys that like being part of something “up and coming”. Both times we were able to raise $500K to $750K for around 10%.

My biz partner is older, married, and has 3 kids so the concept of running lean and bootstrapping doesn’t appeal to him.

#4

Very tempting, to have enough funds for one or two hires right out of the gate.

#5

Wow, 500-700K for 10% seems pretty good, to value you at 7M (though I know nothing of this stuff). I’m not too far from those rolling hills, might need to drive around there more often :smile:

Welcome!

#6

I think the Silicon Valley start-ups are making raising angel money more difficult than it needs to be. The trick is to:

  1. Start with “small” amounts … pitch 'em $50K.
  2. Talk with people who are/were business people but not tech business. Tech business people will focus on the How but really you want to sell them on the What. Depending on the opportunity your building, explain how they can use it to better their lives. Get them to believe in it.

From my experience, they will want to up the amount on their own. The most we had from a single entity was $250K.

@ian I’ve known about our relative proximity for a while. Should you find yourself in upper Fairfield county/lower Litchfield county of CT, would love to buy you a beer or cup of coffee sometime.

#7

Sounds good! We should do some kinda bootstrapped event perhaps at some point.