Brief summary of the dramatic events taking place in Turkey for the past couple of days…
How to get massive traction / usage to your product
Working midnights (including Saturdays) is the new work-life balance. #amsterdam #limk #rockstart (at Limk HQ)
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
How I Met 75 Investors and Raised $650,000
Love With Food graduated from 500 Startups accelerator program about a year ago and we raised $650,000 in June of 2012. It was 3 painful months of fundraising. If you think fundraising is a piece of cake just because we were a 500 alum, think again! When I first began fundraising, all I hear was discouragement. Most will tell me the food space is hard, being a solo founder makes it even harder. Fundraising is one of the most painful things I’ve done in my life. It’s physically exhausting and worst of all, it was mentally torturing. My mind started to play games with me, and every waking moment, I had to fight the thoughts of being a failure and was at the brink of giving up countless times. Not only I had to endure the heartaches of rejections, I had to defend myself against cynicism that I didn’t have an Ivy league education hence I wasn’t qualified to run a startup. There are many reasons not to fund Love With Food, but me not having a MIT/Stanford education is definitely not a legit and fair one. I remembered walking out of that meeting and said “Watch me BITCH, I’ll prove you wrong.” Prove her wrong, I did. In 3 months, I pitched to 75 investors and raised more money than we needed. People often ask me how I met 75 investors. Looking back, here are the 10 different things I did:
1) Wear your Company T-shirt
If you know me, you know that I’m always in my Love With Food t-shirt, jeans and a black blazer. In the usual fashion, I wore my Love With Food t-shirt to Women 2.0 conference last year. During lunch, this dude holler, “Hey, Love With Food. I read about your company. I’m intrigued. Tell me more!” It so happened that this dude is the partner at Blue Run Venture. After the conference, we met up again and he wrote me a check within a week.
2) Angel List
Be on Angel List. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have your company profile on Angel List. After we started to trend on Angel List, we had many inbound interest. In the end, 3 investors on Angel List invested and one of them eventually became our lead. If it wasn’t for Angel List, I wouldn’t have met these 3 investors!
