We just closed $250,000 in funding. AMA.
Hey folks,
We just closed our pre-seed round of funding, raising $250,000 for Paperstack (https://paperstack.ca)
Paperstack is a bookkeeping and tax filing platform, aiming to help freelancers automate bookkeeping, maximize tax write-offs, and file taxes.
Happy to share my personal (and first-time) experience raising capital, pitching to investors, negotiating the terms, and navigating the rejection.
Very cool! Are you pre-revenue? What are your key metrics?
By the time we started fundraising, we had over 350 individual users going through our platform. We had a few dozen of paying customers, 75% recurring.
How did you connect with inventors Ex Linkedin/Cold email? , important points to mention in Pitch Deck? things to look for in a potential investor? How did you calculate you TAM?
Hey @Airbooks_app,
In addition to LinkedIn / Email, we found a few lists online containing emails of angels and what they invest in, and started DM'ing. We also asked other founders for introductions. We scored over 150 meetings in a span of 2 months. Surprisingly, all the investors who put in the $$$ at the end were introduced to us by 1) other investors and 2) our connections who knew us for years.
We found Gay Kawasaki's Pitch-deck template to work pretty well. (https://guykawasaki.com/the-only-10-slides-you-need-in-your-pitch/)
For TAM, we started by looking up numbers of potential users in government sources. For us, those were small business and employment reports, breaking down the number of freelancers and self-employed. We took those numbers, and used bottom-up calculation, multiplying the overall amount by the ARPU.
P.s. let me now if you're looking for investor lists - happy to share links.
@mrShiningWizard thanks for sharing , this in info awesome.
Yes pls do share the list my email airbooksapp@gmail.com. Final question how were you able to get you first few customers? i mean apart from friends.
A few investor lists you might find helpful:
Thanks a ton for sharing:)
Really great question. None of our early customers were friends, actually.
We launched by posting what we were up to on Linkedin. It was a post with a problem statement and a CTA to sign up on our website.
The signup process included a Stripe payment as a very last step. I almost thought it was a test glitch when we received our very-first $500 payment from a client that just went through the entire flow without ever speaking or meeting any of us before.
Thats awesome !