
Anatomy of a Seed Round During Covid-19 - luu
https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/anatomy-of-a-seed-round-during-covid-19
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rememberlenny
The visual map of where the money came from is incredibly helpful. Thank you!

Direct link for the lazy: [https://uploads-
ssl.webflow.com/5dad2b1e508f04886d0245c3/5f3...](https://uploads-
ssl.webflow.com/5dad2b1e508f04886d0245c3/5f3b0a0cc95ca033b5715bb2_image.png)

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pseudolus
>>Record your calls and self-assess<<

I'm assuming that the other party was informed the call was being recorded.
I'm not sure I'd be too comfortable dealing with an entity which recorded my
calls without my consent, an act which in certain jurisdictions may not even
be legal.

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fitzrocks
I'm the author of the post - yes, of course. best i can remember, a handful of
people asked to not record. almost all were fine with it.

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dustingetz
Thanks for writing this. Is this tree of 38 small checks what most seed round
looks like? Needing to manage the chemistry of that many people gives huge
meaning to when funded founders say, if they could do it again they would
bootstrap.

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malisper
I think some seed rounds work this way. Some seed rounds have a small number
of large checks that fill up the entire round.

For managing chemistry, the extent of our interaction with most of the
investors is they are on our investor mailing list. Besides that, we ask them
when we need help with something.

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twayback
What did you guys get diluted to? :( I hope this was a good stable valuation
across all investors.

What's the value in raising really low amounts like 5k? would it not have made
sense to keep a minimum amount e.g. > 50k/100k?

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fitzrocks
Hey! I wrote the post.

SAFEs make it easy these days to add someone to the round (for any amount).
The issue becomes time management (is it really worth hours of calls,
responding to questions over email, etc) trying to close such a small check.

There's a secondary issue of wrangling each investor in subsequent rounds or
an acquisition (which that can just gets kicked down the road). Some investors
provide value beyond their money, mostly with their connections to other
investors, connections to potential customers, and skills in certain areas, or
just generally someone you can call for advice.

One thing I've learned having gone thru this process: it's common for angel
investors to write small checks, though not common knowledge. I always thought
you needed to write a $25-50k check to be able to invest in a startup. It's
common for people in the industry to invest smaller amounts like $5k-$10k,
sometimes even less than $5k. I've even now started doing it myself.

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ForHackernews
> Freshpaint collects behavioral customer data from your website and app, and
> sends that data to hundreds of analytics and marketing tools in one click.

Oof. I'm sure there are many people who want this thing, but I really of wish
our economy weren't structured so that pouring over a million bucks into the
N+1th surveillance ad-tech thing seemed like a good investment.

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cityzen
It's always interesting to me to see a platform like this that puts so much
focus on raising money while their first tier product is free. In fact it says
FREE FOREVER! Their other pricing is custom in which I'd have to contact them.
I always have a hard time understanding what the appeal is to a seed investor
in a product that is going to be free for the vast majority of users.

Anyone smarter than I am have any insights into this? Does a company like this
miss out on product development because they are spending so much time raising
money?

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nkristoffersen
As a paying customer of Freshpaint, my perspective is they are building a
great product with a clear value proposition.

The steady stream of product improvements tells me they are still very focused
on product development.

