Max Brun raised $18M across seed and Series A rounds from eBay Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and others. He breaks down what investors actually want to see: clear milestones like GMV and take rate, proof of traction even without a relevant background, and a TAM big enough to matter. Plan three funding rounds ahead from the start.
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which you've of course now raised from some pretty awesome investors as far as like eBay Ventures, even Dick's Sporting Goods venture arm and FJ Labs. So could you maybe share a little bit more about what the fundraising journey has been like?
Yep, absolutely. So we've raised about $18 million to date. We did 2 seed rounds. We raised a $1.8 million seed round while we were in 500 Startups. So we went through a couple accelerators. We did 500 Startups. We did MassChallenge before that, and we did the Harvard i-Lab as well. Those were all great for us. We raised our seed round, which is kind of like a party angel round, but got some institutional investors in on the like end of that round, including Global Founders Capital, who ended up leading our Series A, and FJ Labs. Then we did another seed round and then we did a Series A, which we kept, we raised on in 2018 and 2019. So yeah, the fundraising journey is tough. I think like, especially in the early stages, some things that I've found is that you have to be thinking multiple steps ahead. If you're just focused on like what the next 18 months looks like, you have to realize that the investor is trying to determine Not just what are you gonna do with the first $2 million you raise, but like most marketplaces take significant capital to build and scale. So are you gonna be able to raise your Series A and Series B? And is the market big enough to do those things? Is this, you know, seed check we write gonna be enough to get you to your Series A round? What are the milestones for that Series A? How much GMV do you have to have? What's your take rate need to be and what's your growth rate need to be? And can you get there in a reasonable amount of time? And then there's thinking another step ahead too, because like an A is probably not enough, or at least it wasn't in our case. So, you know, then you have to be able to raise a B. How big is that round? What valuation does that require? So I think like being able to think multiple steps ahead and communicate that to investors was really helpful because it showed that we weren't just thinking about the step right in front of us. We were thinking multiple steps ahead and like how all the pieces were gonna fit together and being able to talk to that in a, I think thoughtful way is really important. And yeah, I think it's just like also finding, I think it's hard to convince investors that your market's big enough. I think like what I realized over time is that sometimes we'd sit down in a meeting and people would be like, oh, the sports market's huge. Like this is a great market. And then other times we'd sit down and be like, who wants to buy used sporting goods? Like, is this a big enough market? And I never, I never changed their mind on that. I mean, we have the first slide in our deck. We're always talking about TAM. We think the opportunity is huge. But I think you kind of get people who are either excited about your market or aren't. And I think started to realize that, like, if I— if you're not excited about our market and sports market kind of at the beginning of the meeting, then like I should probably just get up and leave. Like, it's going to be a really tough conversation. So I think like investing time and building relationship and continuing to keep investors updated who are excited about your market, but maybe not there yet on where you are in the lifecycle is something that worked really well for us. A lot of investors said no before they said yes, especially in the very beginning while we were trying, like keeping them updated of, you know, here's our growth this month, here's our growth this month. And eventually I think they started to see that we were executing especially as founders with no background, right? We didn't have like a strong resume to point to. We had to point to our own numbers and prove it. And so we would keep people updated. And through that spring of 2016, we were able to start to get some checks in and build momentum and get the thing done. So those are some of the keys from our fundraising story.
