8 ms·

How I Met 75 Investors and Raised $650,000

96 points by United857 14y ago

namank 14y ago
Congrats! Concern: is 650k after 75 investors inefficient?
- laluser 14y ago
  I don't think it's a concern. The investors were out there all along, she just had to find them. Talking about efficient/inefficiency doesn't make much sense here.
- buro9 14y ago
  It's more efficient than 75 investors and $0. Though seriously, there are no overnight successes and no-one is just going to give you $1m regardless of what we read on HN. I don't have my notebook at hand to cite the exact number, but Matthew Prince of Cloudflare pitched to something like 60 or 70 investors. This was with Project Honeypot in the bag, and a stack of existing users via that, and the basis for what became Cloudflare tested. My point is: Even with the idea and execution you're not just going to get the investment. I think the real thing that Aihui achieved in a short time was to demonstrate determination, perseverance... and in the words of Mark Suster ( http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-lines-not-dots/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-line... ) showed that her company (led by her) is a line going up and to the right, rather than a dot. It was most likely the weekly check-ins and constant hard grind at the communication that helped her get the investment.
  - ryguytilidie 14y ago
    But is it more efficient than 0 investors and $0? It seems like if most people doing startups are having 70 investor meetings they could be better spending that time working on the product right? I think cloudflare is kind of an outlying example here.
    - tempestn 14y ago
      If you don't have a business at all, its efficiency is somewhat irrelevant. Not all startups can bootstrap their way up from nothing; some do require initial capital.
- milkshakes 14y ago
  Steve Schwarzman had to pitch over a hundred times before he got his first bite for Blackstone. And he wasn't exactly a nobody at the time either.
friendstock 14y ago
Congrats, Aihui!
jakejake 14y ago
That is some serious tenacity - love it!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
DustinCalim 14y ago
It's the terms of that $650k that matter...
robryan 14y ago
Being a single founder how did the business travel during those 3 months of what must have been near fulltime fundraising?
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  I'd guess that she built some small prototypes first on a shoestring budget, then used that to raise the funds over 3 months. Now that she has $650K, she can probably hire a few extra people and work on it full time for a couple years. Fairly standard way to go. Putting the breaks on to acquire funding to continue is common.
lsc 14y ago
1) Wear your Company T-shirt heh. I've actually thought about this a lot. I always wear a company shirt, yeah, but I also tend to wear the same clothing all the time, too, on the theory that it makes me more recognizable, and that being recognized is good. My theory (which may, of course, be wrong) is that in branding? being consistent and recognizable is far more important than looking good. But then, I'm trying to generate word of mouth for small customers, not trying to get investors, so the rules may be different... but it sounds like she has a similar philosophy.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Mahn 14y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but I always thought wearing your company t-shirt makes you look obnoxious, specially if no one has heard of the company.
  - gregpilling 14y ago
    it is just you (kidding). How would they hear of you? Why not wear a t-shirt! T-shirts are a pretty low-cost investment in promotion. I can buy a black shirt with a single color imprint for $3.50 in small runs. A good pen with the company name on it would cost the same. (source: I have been buying giveaway crud for 20+ years) Giving away a metric ton of shirts can have some other interesting effects. In the early days of my manufacturing company we gave away many shirts to people within the industry. We started getting calls about 'our people' attending events that we did not attend. It turns out that some of our customers really saw other customers at trade events, but there were so many people with our company shirt on that they impression was that we were attending in force - we werent at the trade event. After giving away 20,000 shirts in a four year period, our customers started complaining about having too many shirts. So the technique does not last forever. It did always amaze me the delight a grown adult would show when they were given a $3 shirt. Almost always a better investment than a pen. Best ideas: Have a decent looking shirt that people want to wear; change base shirt colors so people can have an option. Some people like blue, some like red. Give them what they want, it doesn't change the cost of the shirt.
vaidabhishek 14y ago
I'm about to head to US tomorrow for 22 days and want to raise $500 for my startup, Frrole.com. Your article helps.
rorrr 14y ago
A) What did you give up for $650K? B) $650K seems such a low amount of money, it's barely enough to hire 2-3 senior level developers for a year, and rent an office space. I have no idea how you guys launch startups with such small amounts of money.
- edu 14y ago
  Are you serious?
  - fuzzythinker 14y ago
    That's not far from the truth for locations like SF bay area.
  - Mahn 14y ago
    If you plan on hiring people and rent an office space, it definitively won't give the company a long life span.
- HNLogInShit 14y ago
  Exactly. The unanswered and huge question here is how much equity she gave up. Without that info, this "story" is not worth much.
- lampooned 14y ago
  Why would a startup so young would blow their money on hiring 2-3 senior level developers?
  - Mahn 14y ago
    Why would they raise money otherwise? Not much point in raising +$500k if you plan to stay solo and coding at home.
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      You could hire lower-level dev staff, and you'll probably need some marketing and admin people, most of whom would be less expensive, and free more time up for a second round of fundraising (assuming that's a goal).
nowentrepreneur 14y ago
Meeting 75 investors is a great indication of much entrepreneurs (here Aihui) believe in what they are doing and ready to go to what extent. Rejections can get on to you and worst is when they start making you doubt the very purpose of what you are doing. It becomes difficult to fuel yourself with passion all the time. Some of the meetings even get you great feedback (along with VC boilerplates). But alls well that ends well. Congrats to Aihui.
- intellegacy 14y ago
  It takes a special kind of person, or a fanatical belief in yourself or the product/company, to handle rejection after rejection after rejection. Supreme confidence in the company and the ability to channel that confidence to investors can be as valuable as a great engineer.
mikecane 14y ago
This is the kind of thing independent filmmakers would do to raise funds. There was no Internet or VC funds in those days to help. They'd pitch professionals who needed to invest: doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, and the like. Do people still go after them to raise funds for tech startups too?
- eterpstra 14y ago
  Spending so much time on sites like HN and TechCrunch, it's easy to forget that there are over half a million businesses started in the U.S. per year, with only a tiny smattering of those being VC funded tech startups. Determined entrepreneurs get money however they can, but mostly pay out of their own pocket or borrow from local banks or credit unions. VC funded businesses are few and far between (except in SF), but seem to get a lion's share of the attention. Source: http://web.sba.gov/faqs/faqindex.cfm http://web.sba.gov/faqs/faqindex.cfm
  - intellegacy 14y ago
    Yea, if you venture outside the HN/500startups tech ecosystem, you notice that there are many, many companies working on the same problems that YC companies are attempting to solve. They just don't get any recognition on HN, which is a little dangerous for HNers.
devgutt 14y ago
Please don't get me wrong, but it seems a lot of work in the wrong thing instead of developing and improving the product, even more wrong if you are a solo. Just my opinion.
- thatfloatingguy 14y ago
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but $650k seems like a huge return on 3 months of one person's work, which they can then pour back into the product, hopefully improving it far more than they could've in 3 months without $650k.
- jyu 14y ago
  OP is a middlebrow dismissal, but I'll bite. She went through 500startups, so it's pretty likely she wants to go through the VC path. Looking at the site and the product (sample food monthly subscription like birchbox but for food), the challenge is not do people like this or does the business model work, but how can I scale from 500 subscribers to 50,000 subscribers to get economies of scale and become profitable. Focusing on getting money to acquire new customers over focusing on improving design/product makes a lot of sense in this specific case.
Smirnoff 14y ago
"One thing Singaporeans love to talk about is FOOD and I made sure our conversation was filled with that." Isn't your company called LOVE WITH FOOD? Aren't you supposed to talk about food regardless?
- osirisnews 14y ago
  In the context of that quote, she was referring to how that particular investor was from Singapore. So they might have talked about their favorite foods from their home as an ice-breaker?
  - Smirnoff 14y ago
    Maybe but it wasn't clear from the post. I think a good take away is that entrepreneurs have to relate to other people when they pitch.
xfour 14y ago
Checked out her site, anyone else feel like she's outed the kool-aid man's family on the icon pack?
aihui 14y ago
Thanks for all the comments and encouragement. Everyone has a different experience and would love to hear other's fundraising experience. I bootstrapped Love With Food 6 months before being accepted into 500 Startups. I'm a Rails developer and was able to build and market the product all by myself. At 500 Startups, I hired 2 more people to join the team. We've been very scrappy even after raising $650,000. Now we are a team of 8. The funding has definitely helped our business scale to a different level.

96 points by United857 14y ago

namank 14y ago

Congrats! Concern: is 650k after 75 investors inefficient?

laluser 14y ago
I don't think it's a concern. The investors were out there all along, she just had to find them. Talking about efficient/inefficiency doesn't make much sense here.
buro9 14y ago
It's more efficient than 75 investors and $0. Though seriously, there are no overnight successes and no-one is just going to give you $1m regardless of what we read on HN. I don't have my notebook at hand to cite the exact number, but Matthew Prince of Cloudflare pitched to something like 60 or 70 investors. This was with Project Honeypot in the bag, and a stack of existing users via that, and the basis for what became Cloudflare tested. My point is: Even with the idea and execution you're not just going to get the investment. I think the real thing that Aihui achieved in a short time was to demonstrate determination, perseverance... and in the words of Mark Suster ( http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-lines-not-dots/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-line... ) showed that her company (led by her) is a line going up and to the right, rather than a dot. It was most likely the weekly check-ins and constant hard grind at the communication that helped her get the investment.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  But is it more efficient than 0 investors and $0? It seems like if most people doing startups are having 70 investor meetings they could be better spending that time working on the product right? I think cloudflare is kind of an outlying example here.
  - tempestn 14y ago
    If you don't have a business at all, its efficiency is somewhat irrelevant. Not all startups can bootstrap their way up from nothing; some do require initial capital.
milkshakes 14y ago
Steve Schwarzman had to pitch over a hundred times before he got his first bite for Blackstone. And he wasn't exactly a nobody at the time either.

friendstock 14y ago

Congrats, Aihui!

jakejake 14y ago

That is some serious tenacity - love it!

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

DustinCalim 14y ago

It's the terms of that $650k that matter...

robryan 14y ago

Being a single founder how did the business travel during those 3 months of what must have been near fulltime fundraising?

RyanZAG 14y ago
I'd guess that she built some small prototypes first on a shoestring budget, then used that to raise the funds over 3 months. Now that she has $650K, she can probably hire a few extra people and work on it full time for a couple years. Fairly standard way to go. Putting the breaks on to acquire funding to continue is common.

lsc 14y ago

1) Wear your Company T-shirt heh. I've actually thought about this a lot. I always wear a company shirt, yeah, but I also tend to wear the same clothing all the time, too, on the theory that it makes me more recognizable, and that being recognized is good. My theory (which may, of course, be wrong) is that in branding? being consistent and recognizable is far more important than looking good. But then, I'm trying to generate word of mouth for small customers, not trying to get investors, so the rules may be different... but it sounds like she has a similar philosophy.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Mahn 14y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I always thought wearing your company t-shirt makes you look obnoxious, specially if no one has heard of the company.
- gregpilling 14y ago
  it is just you (kidding). How would they hear of you? Why not wear a t-shirt! T-shirts are a pretty low-cost investment in promotion. I can buy a black shirt with a single color imprint for $3.50 in small runs. A good pen with the company name on it would cost the same. (source: I have been buying giveaway crud for 20+ years) Giving away a metric ton of shirts can have some other interesting effects. In the early days of my manufacturing company we gave away many shirts to people within the industry. We started getting calls about 'our people' attending events that we did not attend. It turns out that some of our customers really saw other customers at trade events, but there were so many people with our company shirt on that they impression was that we were attending in force - we werent at the trade event. After giving away 20,000 shirts in a four year period, our customers started complaining about having too many shirts. So the technique does not last forever. It did always amaze me the delight a grown adult would show when they were given a $3 shirt. Almost always a better investment than a pen. Best ideas: Have a decent looking shirt that people want to wear; change base shirt colors so people can have an option. Some people like blue, some like red. Give them what they want, it doesn't change the cost of the shirt.

vaidabhishek 14y ago

I'm about to head to US tomorrow for 22 days and want to raise $500 for my startup, Frrole.com. Your article helps.

rorrr 14y ago

A) What did you give up for $650K? B) $650K seems such a low amount of money, it's barely enough to hire 2-3 senior level developers for a year, and rent an office space. I have no idea how you guys launch startups with such small amounts of money.

edu 14y ago
Are you serious?
- fuzzythinker 14y ago
  That's not far from the truth for locations like SF bay area.
- Mahn 14y ago
  If you plan on hiring people and rent an office space, it definitively won't give the company a long life span.
HNLogInShit 14y ago
Exactly. The unanswered and huge question here is how much equity she gave up. Without that info, this "story" is not worth much.
lampooned 14y ago
Why would a startup so young would blow their money on hiring 2-3 senior level developers?
- Mahn 14y ago
  Why would they raise money otherwise? Not much point in raising +$500k if you plan to stay solo and coding at home.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    You could hire lower-level dev staff, and you'll probably need some marketing and admin people, most of whom would be less expensive, and free more time up for a second round of fundraising (assuming that's a goal).

nowentrepreneur 14y ago

Meeting 75 investors is a great indication of much entrepreneurs (here Aihui) believe in what they are doing and ready to go to what extent. Rejections can get on to you and worst is when they start making you doubt the very purpose of what you are doing. It becomes difficult to fuel yourself with passion all the time. Some of the meetings even get you great feedback (along with VC boilerplates). But alls well that ends well. Congrats to Aihui.

intellegacy 14y ago
It takes a special kind of person, or a fanatical belief in yourself or the product/company, to handle rejection after rejection after rejection. Supreme confidence in the company and the ability to channel that confidence to investors can be as valuable as a great engineer.

mikecane 14y ago

This is the kind of thing independent filmmakers would do to raise funds. There was no Internet or VC funds in those days to help. They'd pitch professionals who needed to invest: doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, and the like. Do people still go after them to raise funds for tech startups too?

eterpstra 14y ago
Spending so much time on sites like HN and TechCrunch, it's easy to forget that there are over half a million businesses started in the U.S. per year, with only a tiny smattering of those being VC funded tech startups. Determined entrepreneurs get money however they can, but mostly pay out of their own pocket or borrow from local banks or credit unions. VC funded businesses are few and far between (except in SF), but seem to get a lion's share of the attention. Source: http://web.sba.gov/faqs/faqindex.cfm http://web.sba.gov/faqs/faqindex.cfm
- intellegacy 14y ago
  Yea, if you venture outside the HN/500startups tech ecosystem, you notice that there are many, many companies working on the same problems that YC companies are attempting to solve. They just don't get any recognition on HN, which is a little dangerous for HNers.

devgutt 14y ago

Please don't get me wrong, but it seems a lot of work in the wrong thing instead of developing and improving the product, even more wrong if you are a solo. Just my opinion.

thatfloatingguy 14y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but $650k seems like a huge return on 3 months of one person's work, which they can then pour back into the product, hopefully improving it far more than they could've in 3 months without $650k.
jyu 14y ago
OP is a middlebrow dismissal, but I'll bite. She went through 500startups, so it's pretty likely she wants to go through the VC path. Looking at the site and the product (sample food monthly subscription like birchbox but for food), the challenge is not do people like this or does the business model work, but how can I scale from 500 subscribers to 50,000 subscribers to get economies of scale and become profitable. Focusing on getting money to acquire new customers over focusing on improving design/product makes a lot of sense in this specific case.

Smirnoff 14y ago

"One thing Singaporeans love to talk about is FOOD and I made sure our conversation was filled with that." Isn't your company called LOVE WITH FOOD? Aren't you supposed to talk about food regardless?

osirisnews 14y ago
In the context of that quote, she was referring to how that particular investor was from Singapore. So they might have talked about their favorite foods from their home as an ice-breaker?
- Smirnoff 14y ago
  Maybe but it wasn't clear from the post. I think a good take away is that entrepreneurs have to relate to other people when they pitch.

xfour 14y ago

Checked out her site, anyone else feel like she's outed the kool-aid man's family on the icon pack?

aihui 14y ago

Thanks for all the comments and encouragement. Everyone has a different experience and would love to hear other's fundraising experience. I bootstrapped Love With Food 6 months before being accepted into 500 Startups. I'm a Rails developer and was able to build and market the product all by myself. At 500 Startups, I hired 2 more people to join the team. We've been very scrappy even after raising $650,000. Now we are a team of 8. The funding has definitely helped our business scale to a different level.