2 min read

Non-obvious Fundraising Lessons from GOAT and Fenwick

"It's less about the fund and more about the individual partner... you're going to need to get along with them and hopefully they respect the fact that it's your company"

Other valuable insights from the session:

The most successful companies are the ones who expand TAM... it's not like 'hey there's a big TAM I'm going to go after it,' it's like 'where is TAM going?'

For a marketplace to be super successful, you have to reduce all friction points in the marketplace.
Strategic investors usually follow a financial investor around valuation but their interests are generally different.... sometimes you may not understand what their long-term strategic goals are and have to be very, very careful about not limiting your opportunities going forward.

Watch the full session here.

If you’re in enterprise or SaaS, you can check in on a competitor’s growth plan by searching LinkedIn to see how many sales reps they have and are hiring, multiply by $500K, and that’s how much in bookings they plan to add this year. Multiply by $250K if the target market is SMB.

Build an MVT, not MVP. An MVP is a basic early version of a product that looks and feels like a simplified version of the eventual vision. An MVT, on the other hand, does not attempt to look like the eventual product. It’s rather a specific test of an assumption that must be true for the business to succeed.

If you’re a SaaS product, try to charge based on your outcome-based metric (# customers, # views per video), rather than your process-based metric (e.g. per user, per time spent). If you charge per seat, aka a process-based value metric, everything works out if your customer is growing. But incentives are misaligned when your customer isn’t. After all, more users using your product makes you more sticky, so give unlimited seats and upsell based on product upgrades.