View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

I’d keep the dilution really low at that stage, and focus on very cheap customer development tactics or even a hybrid services model to test out your initial hypothesis without requiring meaningful outside funding.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

In two cases, these businesses were doing significant early revenue ($500K/month+), so could be considered “post-seed”, although both of these companies had not raised significant institutional capital before we led their rounds. Of the last 15 investments we’ve made, 8 have been pre-product or pre-seed style rounds.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 18, 2020

You can read various articles out there which will give you the cursory facts about Airbnb like their overall revenue or profitability or how their business has faired here in 2020 in the COVID environment. But ops & customer support is another 17-20% of revenue and arguably you couldn’t run the business if you took that away.

North America 401

North America IPO Prospectus Europe 401

View from Seed

MARCH 5, 2019

There are a variety of quick write-ups on the Lyft S-1 for basic figures like annual revenue, rider growth, or who the largest shareholders are. Early on, one of the key questions for all ride sharing companies was the breadth & depth of usage by their customers. Revenue per rider has more than doubled from 2016–2018 (from $15.88

Aggregator 120

Aggregator IPO .Net Revenue 120

View from Seed

JULY 8, 2021

Lula’s customers range from trucking & logistics companies to car rental fleets to military personnel, and Lula offers them insurance products that can be tailored to their needs even if episodic in nature. The Lula team took this from an idea to live with paying customers in their first market segment within about 5 months.

API 156

API Miami Cofounder Boston 156

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

Generate Real Revenue. Another approach to raise Series A is to drive meaningful revenue. Similar to a revenue-focused strategy, this approach goes further than vanity metrics in demonstrating ultra-high engagement and penetrations into a small number of users/buyers. Craft a Small Scale Machine. Go for your Series A earlier.

Syndicate 333

Syndicate Syndication Seed Stage Startup 333

View from Seed

JUNE 13, 2019

revenue business still growing >50% YoY? Embedded Growth From Existing Customers. One of the key features of Chewy’s business is the recurring nature of customer purchases. Chewy now has over 10 million customers, repeat purchases by existing customers account for approximately 90% of their revenue today.

Leadership 214

Leadership .Net Revenue Acquisition 214

View from Seed

JULY 8, 2021

Lula’s customers range from trucking & logistics companies to car rental fleets to military personnel, and Lula offers them insurance products that can be tailored to their needs even if episodic in nature. The Lula team took this from an idea to live with paying customers in their first market segment within about 5 months.

API 120

API Miami Cofounder Boston 120

View from Seed

JULY 22, 2020

A company that has grown revenue or users by XXX% isn’t valuable just because it’s bigger, but because that traction has unlocked other things that make the business more valuable as well. This may allow you to monetize your customers better by improving retention and increasing the ROI on your marketing spend.

Early Stage 254

Early Stage Retention PR Founder 254

View from Seed

DECEMBER 6, 2018

But top line revenues are only one aspect of success. So beyond headline revenue/GMV, it’s not clear that shopping holidays generate incremental demand or significantly shift share from other retailers. Just looking at the sales totals, it’s obvious that there is a great deal of money being made on these days.

Demand 136

Demand China Sales Revenue 136

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

This skillset is usually not required / less important until later stage of the business when you’re wrestling with more complex questions, such as “what are the predictive indicators of churn?”, “what’s the forecasted LTV of given customer cohort?”, or the need to build dynamic demand forecasting models. Candidate archetypes?

Analytics 149

Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

View from Seed

JANUARY 26, 2022

Blockchain games channel mod culture and empower third-party developers to customize their own gameplay experiences through plug-ins and third-party clients. This maximizes network effects, encourages creative expansion, and builds real community via ownership–all while securing additional revenue streams.

Flash 156

Flash Architecture Security Community 156

View from Seed

JULY 7, 2015

His company is a bootstrapped startup (for now, he says) that helps other software companies price their products based on what customers will actually pay — and essentially avoid leaving revenue on the table. How to price a software product correctly to maximize revenue and avoid leaving money on the table early on.

Bootstrapping 120

Bootstrapping Founder Boston Cofounder 120

View from Seed

APRIL 13, 2016

Oli Gardner is the co-founder of Unbounce, a platform that helps you build, test, and optimize landing pages to convert customers.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Startup Demand Revenue 120

View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

I was starting to think that I was invincible, infallible, that I had the magic touch … but, as it turns out, amazingly innovative products don’t necessarily produce amazing revenue. You make your case with objective data: CTR, customer acquisition cost, etc. ” It’s a very different story.

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

View from Seed

JULY 24, 2015

Wayfair got to $250M revenue (7 yrs) without a very good idea which products were in supplier inventory and which weren’t. It’s about hits that can generate customers, not just hits on popular sites for the sake of ego-stroking. Galen Moore (@galenmoore) July 21, 2015. We had a plan.

Boston 120

Boston Cofounder B2C PR 120

View from Seed

JUNE 16, 2015

In my opinion, VCs shy away from directly answering the questions pertaining to “at what point a company is fundable” or give a generic answer regarding revenue. For ecommerce: >$500K revenue/month. VCs also love businesses with a high degree of customer referral activity. For SaaS: At least $100K in MRR.

Boston 120

Boston Syndicate Syndication eCommerce 120

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Not only top-line growth in users or revenue, but also secondary numbers which speak to usage engagement and retention can instill confidence that the startups trajectory will continue after the next round of capital. Marketing Deep Dive: How are you acquiring those customers and why?

Seed Stage 166

Seed Stage Retention Restful Valuation 166

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

Rob,” he said, “no offense, but you aren’t going to get a world class, been-there-done-that CEO into a company with less than $1 million in revenue. Over the last year, we finally had a strong revenue base and a great team in place, and I was able to take three weeks of vacation. Startups are incredibly hard.

Founder 120

Founder Startup Cofounder Business Model 120

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

The community has given birth to tremendous successes and lots of failures, participants have come and gone, round sizes have grown, hot sectors have cooled, reignited, and cooled again, and founders have come from every conceivable background to build here and seek talent, customers, and funding from an increasingly diverse field of investors.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage New York New York City Startup 120

View from Seed

JANUARY 24, 2018

Getting more customers. Is this something that will be used every single day by a target set of customers? For this reason, we’ve partnered with Guild members who have experience across different kinds of customers, business models, and distribution channels. Building a great product. Not running out of money. by Tapjoy).

Operations 176

Operations Cofounder Technical Review Angel Investor 176

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2018

The venture capital market in this category is fairly concentrated among series A and expansion-stage funds that prefer to invest in companies with substantial revenue. The seed ecosystem for health companies is much less robust than in traditional software. 3) Health Data Applications.

Vertical 120

Vertical Stealth Portfolio Seed Capital 120

View from Seed

JUNE 7, 2019

Are customer so excited about it that they are telling other people about it and getting them hooked as well? Some companies can attract tons of happy customers, but have a hard time capturing the value that they create. Some companies can attract tons of happy customers, but have a hard time capturing the value that they create.

eCommerce 42

eCommerce Business Model Revenue Founder 42

View from Seed

AUGUST 30, 2016

Next, look at the average revenue per user numbers (courtesy of Piktochart ) are listed below, and while this information is from 2015, it’s interesting to note the trends (Instagram projected to rise to $9 by 2020 according to Forbes ). In addition, look at Facebook’s revenue per user growth globally over the past few quarters.

Social Media 185

Social Media B2B North America Media 185

View from Seed

JUNE 23, 2022

Automating their end-to-end eCommerce operations (from managing inventory to order fulfillment to customer service). RH: Who are your customers? To my surprise, people actually watched my channel and several years later I launched an eCommerce website to better monetize my channel, which became my top revenue stream.

DC 156

DC Cambodia eCommerce Social Media 156

View from Seed

OCTOBER 22, 2015

So fundraising time needs to be taken into account, as well as potential offsetting of expenses by revenue, though here, the most conservative of estimates is best. For instance, are you anticipating that big, key customer in less than a year? Escape the time-based model vacuum. Don’t raise as much.

Seed Capital 120

Seed Capital Seed Stage Demand Finance 120

View from Seed

MARCH 22, 2016

Even if you’re in the pre-revenue, pre-seed or seed stage, there are still ways to get on a reporter’s radar. A business publication may care less about the technical nuances, but you can bet they’ll want to hear about your numbers and your strategy for raising revenue. This one is tricker in the pre-revenue stage.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup CTO Hire 120

View from Seed

MARCH 15, 2017

Internally, the scarcity of tangible business metrics – product usage or revenue multiples for example – can make an investment decision feel daunting. These bullets are usually a combination of in-network, in-portfolio calls, individual research, product testing, customer-user interviews, and founder reference calls.

Due Diligence 265

Due Diligence Seed Stage Portfolio Metrics 265

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

they can range from customer acquisition, product engagement/stickiness, or business model. growth/revenue target) to get to the next stage/financing round. E.g. For an e-commerce company, anything that involves payments/its ability to charge customers could clear the threshold. How should you think about impact?

Hiring 120

Hiring Bandwidth Product Early Stage 120

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Five years ago, TapCommerce CEO & Co-Founder Brian Long had a vision of helping brands deliver customers, revenue, and ROI across mobile devices. And after demonstrating early traction with customers, we were joined again by Scott Friend at Bain Capital Ventures in a Series A round, which Attentive announced today.

Cofounder 136

Cofounder SMS Channel Mobile 136

View from Seed

MAY 27, 2015

They’re now a Series C startup delivering millions of boxes of snacks to customers each year. ” Episode 2: Lee Hower, Co-Founder, NextView Ventures — Lee shares the story of co-founding LinkedIn and getting hired by Elon Musk to X.com (merged with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s Confinity to form PayPal ).

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Early Stage Non-Compete Silicon Valley 120

View from Seed

MARCH 20, 2020

In the face of plummeting revenues, restaurants are being forced to lay off workers to reduce costs, as they are still responsible for ongoing costs like rent and taxes. I predict that many of these customers will stick as they learn of the benefits associated with delivery.

New York City 374

New York City Demand Technical Review Non-Compete 374

View from Seed

APRIL 23, 2015

This is doing right by both your company and your customers. Additionally, if you’re talking to VCs, it’s implied that you’re thinking big and thinking about a large acquisition or IPO, as well as generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Early, premium partnerships or customers you’ve already converted.

Founder 120

Founder Distribution Viral Seed Stage 120