How I manage my customers turned investors
Jon: Do your investors ask for discounts or do they pay full price now that you’re
a real business?
Raad: We haven’t seen that come up yet. Our product is really meant for Big Tech
companies, pre IPO, recently gone tech companies. Unless they run a company like
that, they don’t really approach us.
But if they do we’d give a discount. We’ll take a 5% or 10% hit on the margin, I’d be
cool with that. I don’t know if our finance team would but if they did come up to us
and they believed in this business and they wrote us a check even before we had a
lead VC and didn’t have a whole lot of money committed upfront initially and they
took that bet us, I'd do it. It’s up to the founder but they’re all super chill and
they’re busy too.
I use this app called Cabal that allows you to segment them out and I have a Product
investor so I'll send interviews with candidates to them for the last round to vet them
out or go through some kind of coding challenge. I have the writers group, they help
me tweak and edit tweet threads. I have big account followers who they’ll engage with
my social content. There are so many other functions now that never existed before
almost like an extension of the company.
That’s very different from the VC experience, which was what I was used to. They’re
great, they have deep pockets, they’ll bail you out but they’re not going to help you
edit a tweet thread, they’re not going to help you interview a candidate. They’re just
too busy for that and that’s fine but that’s what we were looking for.
Ultimately we raised $6M bucks using this journey RUV set up. We ended up getting
this founder turned VC at the end to fill up the rest of the round so instead of getting
a VC, in the beginning, to put in a chunk and convince everybody else, we convinced
everybody else and then got $3.7M wire at the very end. It was just very different,
there are no rules for it, and there was not really much guidance. I went with the flow
and it ended up working out pretty well.