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From NoCode Side Project to Raising $750k: AMA

Hey IH 👋

18 months ago, I was raising money for my previous startup, and was really taken aback by the variance of Good VS Bad investor interactions - I realised that I didn't really have a clue who I was speaking to, and that it was likely most other founders were in similar boats!

After a particularly unprofessional investor interaction, I wished that I had a way to share the experience with other founders, to avoid them going through the same pain in the a** process we went through - and so the idea for an Anonymous Investor Review site popped up, enter Landscape 😎

To test the idea, I created an review form on Typeform, and started sending it out to founders in my network, asking them to review their investors, and rate them out of 12 score factors (Approachability, Professionalism, Response Time, Due Diligence, etc etc). To my surprise, almost all of the founders I spoke with wanted to submit reviews.

Things started picking up a bit after that, and we quickly got our first 100 reviews with just manual outreach, so I decided to iterate on the product.

Despite being a Comp Sci grad. I'm a dreadful programmer, so decided to continue down the no code route, and used Glide to create a very basic first version of the app.

Things continued to move forward, and at the start of the year I realised that as a solo founder I just wasn't able to keep up with how fast things were moving. We had a revenue stream, but it was never going to scale to the level where I could make additional hires, so I decided to go out to the market and try and raise some capital.

All in all the raise took ~6 weeks, and we ended up closing just shy of $750k from a group of 25 angels. Throughout the fundraise process, I was pretty clear with all of the investors that I wasn't entirely sure what Landscape could become, but purely based on the totally organic traction we had gotten so far, it felt like there was something to explore.

We've since hired out a team, and have moved to a code based platform - we're focusing now on building a wider range of solutions that can help founders throughout their fundraise, and we've got a lot in store!

Happy to answer questions on anything whatsoever :)

If you've ever had interactions with investors, drop in and leave an anonymous review 🤗

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    Anonymous Investor Review huh...I like it! Do you think you could have bootstrapped this potentially or did you have to go the funding route?

    It's interesting that your product has founders giving anonymous reviews on investors too, has anyone had a low score on the platform and reached out?

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    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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