Sandro Roco raised $1.3 million for Sanzo, more than double his initial $600k target. Scott Belsky from Adobe invested early and became a customer, which attracted Jen Rubio from Away and accelerated the round. Roco ran the business alone during the pandemic while fundraising, dealing with intense pressure and a volatile capital raise.
Well, and then eventually you raised $1.3 million last year. Take me through that process then, fundraising, how you decided who to bring on board in terms of your investors. I'm curious about that.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting was my goal was to actually only raise $600,000. And I feel very fortunate that I was actually able to raise the $1.3 because we've needed— yeah, we definitely— it was definitely advantageous to have it, especially during the pandemic. So I'll say, you know, that round got published, I guess it was Forbes in like July or August of 2020. Truthfully, that round took probably about 7 to 9 months to put together. So, and it's interesting because, you know, I started out trying to raise $600,000, was doing very terribly at that. And then all of a sudden it got, the round got hot and I raised $1.3 million in about 6 weeks. Just to kind of show you the volatility that can occur in a fundraising round. So, you know, I was still going in the earliest days, just my own very like, you know, kind of bootstrap self-financing type of mentality. But, you know, got to a point where I was starting to be stretched for dollars. And so opened up, you know, we did it through a convertible note round. Fortunately had some friends put in the first, you know, maybe like $50,000, $75,000. And then we did get a— basically, he was an early customer. His name is Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, a very prominent angel investor. At the time, I would literally look up all of my customers. So, when I got a Shopify, get the ka-ching, I'm like, just curious. We weren't getting a ton of orders. And it was my first time running a business. So, I'm like, hey, this is cool. Who is this person? And obviously, no, I mean, I knew who Scott Belsky was just because I'd been in technology. And so reached out to him. Silly me, like I didn't find his investment website. So I actually asked him, hey, Scott, do you invest? And now it's like, that was the dumbest question ever because obviously he invests. But so when he came on, you know, that brought in a couple other folks. But we actually, I mean, I'll be honest, we did hit another Lull. The biggest thing that really spurred it on was around May, I want to say, and this was in the middle of the pandemic. You know, it was really bad times. Jen Rubio came on, who's the co-founder of Away, and between her and Scott, you know, they both just have a lot of trust and like their networks, like they, you know, fortunately The switches started flipping on on the networks, and then the round just got like. I'll tell you this: the like the first like couple like maybe call two hundred thousand maybe took me five months. The last one point one million took me six weeks, and probably could have even happened quicker than that. The problem was like I was still the only employee, so I was still like having to like run the business and put up the numbers that we needed to. you know, validate, you know, what we were doing and then also go fundraise. So quite a stressful time during the summer. It was— that was like, yeah, I had to really kind of dig deep on that one. But it was— we got through it.
What type of feedback were you getting from Jen and Scott when they obviously became investors? They've done a number of investments, some higher profile. Like, what were they saying about why they invested in you?
It was brand and brand potential. They were like, we think this product basically like it hits. And also they saw where I was going with building community and building community and that that community itself was already that a significant portion of that community had like high purchasing power but was significantly underrepresented. So basically what long and short of it was, you know, us being an Asian-inspired product, if you look at, uh, just how much like the, the, the AAPI, uh, purchasing power plus how much of it we spend on our demographic spends on brands and how much we over-index on like social media. So essentially like you're creating your initial word-of-mouth flywheel. Like the early, uh, rumblings were there if you, if you created the right product and then marry that with the macro trends that, you know, we all had seen and that I talked about with, you know, Crazy Rich Asians and all this other stuff. It just kind of created that marriage that we weren't— that we both had an initial tribe of Asian Americans, but that the broader American populace was also— it was open to that population as well. So, and then look, like ultimately, You know, I had to convince them that I was a good— that I could be a good steward of capital, that I could build a good team. You know, we're going especially through that team building process right now. Actually, we're wrapping up another fundraising round right now. So especially in beverage, you know, one of the things as well is can this person just continue to raise money? Because you do need to raise a decent amount of money to keep the lights on. So yeah, I mean, if you want other specifics, maybe, you know, maybe you could ask— maybe I'll get you to ask Jen and Scott. But I think those are the primary things.
