In the past few months I have moderated, participated and attended panels around New York City hearing views from both venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs about the current state of the financial and capital markets. I have also been hearing stories and snippets from the 10% of venture backed companies and/or those are seeking financing within the Collective-E membership base. To get a more in depth picture I approached Collective-E member Julie Brown, Founder and CEO of Inner Rewards, who was more than generous and forthcoming about the challenges and obstacles of raising money in the "great recession." Her story literally had me sitting on the edge of my seat, not knowing from one day to the next if she was going to survive. I think her story is playing out in startups around the country and she is a lucky one, she is still surviving.
Here is the story with a chronological timeline in Julie’s words:
September-March 2007—While still working at Johnson & Johnson I started writing my business plan using Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Art of the Start where he lays out the needs one must address to investors.
June 2008—With a 40 page business plan, Power Point presentation and executive summary I was introduced by two people to a VC/Angel Investor who is a limited partner at Sequoia Capital. Back in the day (a year ago) this happened a lot, on the word of a couple connections, two meetings and with little due diligence, the investor jumped in as an investor with a first round of $765k. It just so happened that he was looking for a consumer internet play targeting women that was not solely advertising based. Inner Rewards is just that, with a business subscription and transaction model, like an eBay, Yelp, and iVillage, we provide content, reviews and deals related around health and wellness.
While many angel investors are more informal, they just want to
give you convertible debt money, but because my investor is a
VC we priced the company and went for a full Series A round.
He also wanted us to build the company up so it would be fully
backed including an executive team and board.
July 2008—I set out to hire a team and get started with an
aggressive goal of building and launching a beta site by the end of
the year. Because my investor wanted to build a company ready
to be fully backed, and given an aggressive timeline to build a
full blown site with content and videos, we ended up with a
very high monthly burn rate (monthly expenses). I immediately
set out to raise more money.
September 15th, 2008—Lehman collapses and the
market is in turmoil, every single investor runs for the
hills. I have now built up a full staff with 7 employees and
40 contractors and need to raise cash quickly or we will run out of
money before I can even launch.
October 2008—I am now fundraising 30 hours per week while
building the company. I continue developing the pitch and am going
to every networking lunch and dinner I can find in Silicon Valley
and New York. I am on the phone at least once per day with a
potential investor. I find that investors are pulling back on new
investments and choosing to invest in their current companies to
keep them alive. In fact, investors start killing companies
in their portfolio so they can focus their resources, meaning they
would actually pull funding and put their money into just a few
select companies.
I eventually do get some more investors to come in, but now each investor takes an average of 8 conversations at 90 minutes each, and for every single person that came in many I talked to didn’t choose to invest. They kept saying that it had nothing to do with their not believing in the company, but they simply didn’t have money. I realized I couldn't take this personally or get over emotional. I went to my original investor and asked for his help and his help was critical. He is very connected and I found that when he made a connection they usually invested after one call. For example, he went to a Goldman Sachs conference, met some guys from Citi and after one call they invested.
November 2008—In November, worried about
raising even more money in tough economic conditions, I started to
cut everything I could from salaries to rent (we moved 3 times) and
contractors. I couldn’t lay off my core team because
there would be no possible way to launch, so employees agreed to
work for less and we cut payroll by 30%. I terminated 25
contractors including marketing people, writers, engineers and
sales people. I was forced to make major decisions on a daily
basis that affected people’s lives, that was challenging.
December 2008—In a miracle feat, we launched our beta
site, albeit a very trimmed down version, but it was launched.
January 2009-- In January, the economy actually got even worse. We launched, which was great, but investors started calling immediately expecting results. Expectations were high and they wanted traffic immediately. Everyone was getting very nervous, investors were scared and they started to pull out. I continued to focus on raising money and my job for at least half of the timewas focused on raising money and the other half was spent appeasing current investors, I didn’t have time to actually run the company. I also needed to keep employees happy and feeling secure, and when I wasn’t there they got nervous and I started to worry that key employees would jump ship.
In late January, my original angel who had 10 portfolio companies was starting to kill them (pulling the plug). I had no idea if he was going to pull our funding. During this time one of the worst things that happened was that we lost a big angel who was going to come in for 500k, but he backed out last minute. After doing a complete dog and pony show, having him spend significant time in the office meeting the team and evaluating everything, he shook my hand, promised the money and then called two days later and backed out. This scared our original investor and he stopped funding. It made him think maybe there was something he didn’t know about or a reason not to invest.
These were my darkest days and very difficult to muster my own motivation, I knew in my heart that we needed 6 months to a year in cash to survive, and I didn’t think we were going to get it; we just didn’t have the metrics to launch in a recession. I feared that we would never really get the chance to thrive. I realized that we were going to run out of money at the end of February so I had a friend come which gave us 1.5 months more in cash, which was a luxury at the time, but was still a very difficult decision for me and one that in some ways I regret; it affected our friendship.
February 2009—I finally decided I needed to take more control of the situation, as a first time CEO you are really learning on the job, and I feel at this time I really started doing the job of CEO. When you are in the middle of it, working 80 hours per week, not sleeping, eating or working out, you sometimes don’t see what is really going on. I realized I hadn’t been thinking properly about how to get out of a hole and that I needed to see the big picture and get original investor resold, my strategy was to make the original investor less scared. It was tough but I wowed him over with everything we had accomplished. For example, we had come in under budget, launched on time and accomplished every single thing we said we would do. I convinced him that it was still a phenomenal idea and he didn’t want his money wasted. I also set realistic expectations explaining that it wasn't going to happen overnight. Finally, guess what? I won him back over, he committed to fully funding the company until we could raise another round!
June 2009— We are now on a run rate of 140k uniques, have over 500k page views and providers paying a monthly rate, but I still feel like we are not close to being out of the woods. As a result, we are still being super frugal by keeping our payroll deductions and expenses low, negotiating everything we can and offering contractors equity instead of cash. I now have more time to focus on the business and spend one to two days per week on fundraising. Our goal now is to build out more of the site features and get the word out to spas and wellness providers, we have traffic but we don’t have enough inventory (massages, spa days, Pilates classes) to sell.
Lessons learned
• Use your investors and find people who are
trusted in the community. Unless you have done this before,
you do not know the right people.
• Investors will give you money when there is no
risk, the more desperate you are, the less chance to get
money.
• Listen to yourself. Our original Investor
wanted breadth not depth, the problem became that we launched the
site and there wasn’t a lot in January to sustain in coming
back. Because your investor will be insisting that you show
how they made money, we showed deal section before we had enough
deals. In hindsight I should have started with an amazing
community and once community ramped up, then made it broader.
In September, the site should be where we want it to be.
Note: If you are a spa or wellness provider, we need your
deals! Learn
more>
Final Thoughts
While it is a great time to start a business, I now realize that we
launched into the worst conditions in which to
fund a new business. Before the "Great
Recession” you could get an idea funded, but now, that is virtually
impossible. Now you have to have the product, the metrics and
a lot of great connections. There is no way we could start
out today and get funding, so we are actually one of the lucky
ones. While many times I wished that had done a smaller, self
funded, home grown kind of company, our market size ($255 Billion
for Spa Industry alone) determined that we needed to be big, so I
have no regrets. We are still crawling around in diapers, but
growing up quickly and look forward to playing with the big
boys.
Does this experience ring true to you? Please tell us your strories of financing your business in "this economy," we can't wait to hear!
