
The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup - dshah
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/98034/The-Pitch-Deck-We-Used-To-Raise-500-000-For-Our-Startup.aspx
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jcampbell1
I am confused about the dates. If they are doing $3.6M revenue run-rate, that
means revenues are $300k/month. Why bother wasting the time to raise what
amounts to 6 weeks of earnings?

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thomson
It looks like they raised their round in 2011, when their run rate was $150k.
The dates in green in that slide are projections.

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joelgascoigne
This is correct, we had a $150k run rate when we raised (and pitched with this
deck) and the $3.6M figure was a projection (and clearly one which was rather
ambitious!).

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intellegacy
What are current revenues if you don't mind me asking?

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jcampbell1
Just over $100k/month.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/buffer-scheduling-
service-n...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/buffer-scheduling-service-now-
making-over-100k-in-monthly-revenue-with-600k-users-sending-5m-updates-per-
month/)

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joelgascoigne
Yep, exactly. April revenue was $115k.

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redguava
Fantastic openness. Thanks.

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beat
Did you hit timing issues with fundraising? Something I see coming for me is
that I want to start generating revenue before actually getting funding (as
Buffer did), but I can't afford to fully surrender a substantial income during
the transition from dayjob+startup to allstartup. Ah, to be in my twenties and
happy with ramen-profitable again...

At any rate, I want a fairly tight window between getting the revenue stream
started and getting funded enough to make a living and hire more people. Any
advice for keeping the size of that window down?

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leowidrich
Great question, here is how we approached this:

    
    
        My best advice is not to drop your work for as long as you can
        until you see traction. In our case, Joel only stopped working after
        we hit ~$1k in monthly revenues. 
        (read: http://joel.is/post/6687368692/startup-bootstrapping) and I
        only dropped out of College a lot later after Buffer actually had
        already received funding and was supporting a team of 5.
    
        I think the key might be to only drop your work once your
        revenues are enough to support you. So I would try and make that
        window almost 0, in our case working nights and weekends is a
        great way to get there.

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beat
Thanks, that's very helpful! Much of my problem is that I'm coming into this
as a full-fledged grownup - twenty years in the industry, two college-aged
kids, mortgage, car payments, etc. What cushion I have is my retirement money,
and my spouse will only let me burn just so much of that before she loses
patience. I could maybe get a few months of pure bootstrapping in, but the
drop from a six figure income to less than minimum wage is very steep indeed.

Right now, it's 20+ hours a week on the startup in my "copious spare time".
What worries me is the pain waiting for me when the rubber meets the road...
the support time and emergency fixes needed when I have real, paying
customers. That's when the conflict between dayjob and startup will truly loom
large.

But what the hell, I WILL make it work. I'm done with working for other
people. I've already signed my Declaration of Independence, but if I want my
freedom, I'm going to need to survive my Valley Forge as well.

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hpagey
I too was doing my startup part time for about 6 months before we were
admitted into an accelerator. I am currently working FT on my startup. But my
personal situation is completely different than yours (no kids, no debt, no
house, low cost of living state, cars all paid, spouse working ..) . Take baby
steps every day and you will be surprized how much you can accomplish in few
months. Be consistent about it and you should be good.

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beat
On the plus side, my wife has a high-paying IT job as well, so we won't starve
immediately. And I'm kind of boggled at how much I've managed to build,
effectively solo (legal help only), in the past six months. But I have another
six before it's really money-ready, I think.

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cagenut
The "zuckerberg's law" = exponential growth premise seems a little red flag-y.

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timjahn
These guys are still one of my favorite startups and stories! Definitely a
consistent inspiration for me.

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quahada
I like the takeaway that the only slide that matters is traction.

Looking at the Team slide, they have a decent amount of social validation from
their advisors & previous investors. I'm guessing this was critical for
getting the intro's to ~200 prospective investors.

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joelgascoigne
We went through AngelPad (accelerator in SF) just before we raised, and
through the program we received our initial $20k funding from AngelPad and
$100k convertible debt funding from two VC firms associated with AngelPad (so
a total of $120k as soon as we got into AngelPad). We then raised a further
$50k from another firm (Inspiration) during the program before demo day and
before we started pitching. So that is the 4 logos you see as previous
investors. We also were lucky to get Guy and Hiten on board as advisors during
our time at AngelPad. This social proof certainly helped us a lot, however it
all happened very close to our pitching and so it is not too comparable to a
true "previous financing". Hope that helps - let me know if you have any more
Qs.

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scottkrager
I was able to chat with Joel a few weeks ago (he has open office hours over
skype! Talk about awesome) and I really think Buffer is the next SEOmoz-like
company that does things the right way and shares along the way.

Loved the layout of the competition slide.

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chebucto
After seeing the slides, I'm not clear on what they do.

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alaskamiller
They make software that schedules and buffers social media posts for pay.

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brianberns
So "cron" for Twitter, yes?

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joelgascoigne
Originally it was simply an 'every minute' cron job. That only scales so far
;)

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dm8
There is only slide that matters on the slide deck and that was really
impressive! It had all the necessary numbers. Kudos!

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AndrewKemendo
Care to tell which slide you thought that was?

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dm8
Slide # 6. I'll also add slide # 7. Rest other slides are optional in my
opinion.

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bernardom
Thank you for sharing this. It's one of the clearest pitch decks I've found.

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ricardobeat
I always thought Buffer fell under "Scheduling Apps".

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joelgascoigne
We're still not too "smart" about our scheduling. We have a few things planned
down the line in our roadmap though.

What we found was that if we can help someone go from sharing once a day to 5
times a day, that would help them much more than if we were to assist them in
sharing that 1 post at exactly the right time. That's why we've kept much more
on the side of pushing forward with integrations and simply making it easier
to add content to Buffer rather than working too much on the intelligent
sharing.

