We accelerate & invest in growth companies

If you are bootstrapped or have FFF (friends & family) funding into your company, there is a possibility that you either don't know your KPIs or have the wrong parameters and data. Anyone who tells you that you don't need this is lying. Investors evaluate your company's worth primarily through this mechanism - benchmarking.

Now, you are probably early stage, so comparing you with the best in the industry, or with your #1 competitor would be meaningless. And often you get clueless as to then what is the right method.

Approaching investors without the right KPIs would get you no calls and results.

You will have to dig deep into your data, if at all you have sufficient data and traction, and come up with the right metrics and numbers.

If you don't have sufficient data, again this can be a chicken and egg problem. And quite often, this is a time consuming task.

And before you figure it out on your own, you've likely spent tens of thousands of your own money with little to show.

We benchmark you against your own vision while still considering your industry or sector's average. What metrics are necessary for you given your company's stage and its business model.

It can be as simple as learning the right DAUs, MAUs (Monthly Active Users), MRR/ARR (Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue), User Retention/Return Ratio, CAC v/s LTV to some advanced KPIs such as knowing the user stickiness, user footprint across your sections/pages/verticals, channelizing your funnel with KPIs etc.

Because we work on all but only the necessary KPIs that investors are interested in, given your business model and sector, you will know exactly where you stand comparing with where you should be, considering the asking capital needs.

Most founders often get this wrong. They interpret the KPIs in a way that is not understood by most investors today, or that is not the way to interpret for their industry.

If they get it right somehow, they benchmark it against the wrong subjects/peers and hence get the wrong gap analysis.

This can be disastrous as the results can then lead the founders to then spend their valuable time and money filling the gaps that were irrelevant for their growth and fundraising.

Once our team collects the benchmarking data and understands the KPIs, we analyze and interpret them to understand the gaps between the current performance and the benchmarked targets.

The gaps can be in terms of a product or feature that is over-built or is poorly built. In some cases, we can also identify missing opportunities that are in demand but not yet built.

The gaps can be in terms of wrong/improper problem-solution-fit and product-market-fit, poor customer/user engagement, weak channel utilization, poor market penetration, wrong customer segment, misinterpration of ideal v/s target users, among others.

Now you will know exactly what has been at the root cause of your stagnated growth. What needs to be fixed before you are ready for your fundraising.

This discovery is the key to your success through the next stages.

There are a million strategies founders could implement, which traditionally has caused analysis paralysis. Growth is stagnated due to multiple reasons - not having enough users, irrelevant KPIs, unrealistic goals, lack of funding to support the desired growth, wrong marketing strategies and implementation, wrong sales funnel, wrong founder-problem-fit and the list keeps growing. With so much to focus on, a founder doesn't really know which method will be the most cost efficient and will drive results.

GTM experts naturally will emphasize on what they are selling and this further creates a decision trauma.

This left founders trying a million things, desperately searching for people to use their app, struggling to maximize revenue, achieve milestones - all of this without any proper goal setting. And who knows it in the first place? Who/what do they trust?

Additionally, founders also aren’t sure what benchmarks to hit to even know what 'success' looked like. Do they need $5K in revenue to impress an investor, or $50K? 1K users or 100K? 20% MoM growth or 15%? Wrong KPIs, wrong goal alignment = struggle.

Founders are left praying, wishing, and hoping that they are implementing the right goals and strategies to grow their startup, as well as doing their best to gain some semblance of success, even though they really didn't know what 'success' was measured by.

This led founders to go weeks, months, or years going after user growth, lost in a sea of 'shiny new tactics' because there was no end goal in sight.

We decided to take a 'top-down' approach to defining what success looks like for a startup's journey from one to ten.

We went and spoke with hundreds of investors to determine what numbers a startup needed to hit to gain their attention and their funding.

This led to the SMART goal setting, which is unique for every startup. Based on the benchmarking results, the company can establish specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for improvement. Achieving these goals (aligned with the target KPIs) would allow them to go into investor meetings with confidence knowing they hit the numbers an early stage investor needed to consider funding them.

Our founders are able to utilize data-drive strategies with the help of our growth team, along with specific goals for user growth.

They now have a better understanding of the user footprint and the kind of stickiness their solution/platform has.

Instead of going into the SMART Goal phase not knowing what success looks like, they have exact numbers and specific tactics they can aim for, with the confidence to know that as soon as they hit those numbers that investors will be clamoring for their attention, instead of the other way around.

Raising funding is hard, and most founders aren't able to do it. Traditionally founders would rely on unrealistic advice like…

- Raising seed money from FFF (friends, family or fools)

- Sign up for all the shiny and costly pitch competition

- Most competitions are overly competitive (even AirBNB lost tons of pitches)

- Participate in startup events all across the globe to network and connect with strangers you wouldn’t like otherwise

- Approach random strange investors on LinkedIn and end up getting demotivated after no response.

- Get a loan or line of credit

- Banks don't lend to new businesses. Period.

This unrealistic approach doesn't work anymore. That's why only less than 2% of all startups raise funding, and the ones who do it takes over 12 months to get it! 12 months is a lifetime for most startups in their early stage – how do you know you will even survive until that time!? By then most startups die in their infancy.

At it's core, raising funding is just a sales and marketing process. The only difference between it and selling a $10/month subscription or a $1K product is that you're trying to sell someone on giving you a $25K+ check. That's it.

BUT most entrepreneurs don't know how to do high ticket sales. Prospecting, targeting, cold email and LinkedIn outreach. Touch points, what to say, how to say it, how to negotiate, how to structure an offer, etc. is something most founders don’t have a clue about.

That's what we do for the founders we work with. Once you start treating your fundraising stage like a sales and marketing issue, it all comes down to a numbers game.

And we being a player on both sides of the table (founders as well as being investors ourselves in over a dozen companies), we know how these cards are played.

Our founders are able to consistently book investor meetings through our network as well as by utilizing the outbound sales and marketing techniques we teach and help them implement. Then raising funding becomes a numbers game.

This combined with some select investor meetings from our network guarantees you achieve your fundraising goal in the shortest time possible at this stage.

- 100 targeted investors

- 20 responses

- 5 meetings booked

- 2 term sheets

- $100K in funding

Need to raise more? Just rinse and repeat.