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The part where I begged for funding is another story: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-project/ https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-

The part where I begged for funding is another story: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-project/ https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-... Also the link to HN launch that helped a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408

e1g 4y ago
It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  > having a social circle to intro investors > with negligible traction Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.
  - e1g 4y ago
    "GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.
    - nickstinemates 4y ago
      for 1.5m, any signal is important to build a story. all of the things you list are important, but typically only in later stages.
  - manv1 4y ago
    Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?
dnadler 4y ago
FYI, the Tutorial link in the footer of the tooljet site seems to be dead: https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro
- navaneethpk 4y ago
  Thanks for noticing, fixing in some time.

e1g 4y ago

It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.

navaneethpk 4y ago
> having a social circle to intro investors > with negligible traction Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.
- e1g 4y ago
  "GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    for 1.5m, any signal is important to build a story. all of the things you list are important, but typically only in later stages.
- manv1 4y ago
  Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?

dnadler 4y ago

FYI, the Tutorial link in the footer of the tooljet site seems to be dead: https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro

navaneethpk 4y ago
Thanks for noticing, fixing in some time.