Fundraising in 2025: Key Trends Every Founder Must Know | Laurits Just, Flippa Invest

I'd definitely be curious, you guys are seeing a lot of different things through Flippa and Flippa Invest. What are some of the general trends you're seeing? Are you seeing that more people are looking to get SaaS companies more funded versus e-commerce? Is there like, we're in 2025 now, is AI still a thing or is it a thing of the past? Is it AI, GPU, ML? Like, what are some of the things that are you seeing on the platform?

We're seeing AI businesses, uh, gain a lot of interest, um, because you can be an— you like— AI businesses have this ability apparently to be, uh, like a very neat and small operation in terms of, uh, headcount.

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan Isaacs. I'm the head of growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for taking time off your day and joining us today. If you've been on any of our webinars, you know how this goes. We have a really good speaker. I'm super excited for them to be here. I'm gonna let Lóriz introduce himself shortly, but before I do, I just wanna go over some basic housekeeping. If this is your first time with us, this platform is called Airmeet. There's a bit of information I need to share because it's not the most intuitive, but on the right-hand side, you can see there's a chat box. Do let us know where you're dialing in from today. I see Israel, Molenko, I'm based here in Dubai, UAE. I see Victor from Brazil, Illinois, awesome, Stockholm, Oklahoma, Guatemala, Denver, San Jose, South Africa, Seattle. Pretty diverse crowd. Thank you so much for joining in today. We had about 350 people sign up for this event. We're at about 115 people live. So it should be a good event. Yeah, awesome. I see a lot of activity in the chat. So the right-hand side is in the chat. Underneath the chat icon, there's a Q&A button. If you have any questions for Loretz during the event, please put it in the Q&A. We're going to have a Q&A section right towards the end. And yeah, and then, yeah, Lily, I see your first question. You'll receive a replay 48 hours, within 48 hours of today's event. Nah, not, sorry, nothing but, sorry, I'm stuttering there. But at the bottom of the screen here, you see a bunch of emojis. If anything that Laurence is saying is resonating, feel free to drop an emoji like thumbs up, heart emoji, all of that stuff is game. All right, we're, I think we're ready. Laurence, I'm gonna kick it over to you. Maybe do you wanna give an introduction to yourself, Flipa Invest? What you're coming, what you're up to, and then I'll jump on maybe right towards the end or just before you wrap up and we'll do some Q&A.

Yeah, sure. Hey everyone, hope you can see me all right. I am dialing in from Copenhagen in Denmark, but I'll be in the US next week and in April and in May as well because I'm doing a bit of a road show. I'll just share, go ahead and share my screen real quick and introduce myself. Uh, you should be able to see, uh, this here, an Infinity share of my screen. Um, but so, um, yeah, I'm, I'm Lauritz. Um, I am gonna talk to you today about, well, I'm gonna talk to you about fundraising because I'm sure many of you are, are in the trenches now and, um, you know, on the lookout for capital to grow your business. I certainly was, and I'll get into that in a second. Like, um, so I currently manage Flippa Invest, and I'll explain what that is, but it's, it's a fundraising platform. Um, but before that, I, um, I was doing my own startup, uh, called Bits 4digits.com. I was doing that for 3 years and got acquired by a company called Flippa, and now I'm doing Flippa Invests, uh, which is a new business unit within that company. Um, and what I was doing in my own startup before, um, joining Flippa was, um, was, was create a marketplace. Um, and if, if any of you are building marketplaces, you know how hard it is to seed it with buyers and sellers, and doing that bootstrapped is also a challenge in and of itself. Um, I, I was— prior to, to doing my own startup, I was also in the fintech space, uh, at a company called BlackRock, um, where I was doing asset management with a, with a tech angle. Um, and prior to that was with a, like, a, a VC, uh, kind of incubator called Rocket Internet. They copy successful concepts in, in Boston and San Francisco and kind of launch them in EMEA. So Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia. And then, yeah, I have a background in economics and information systems, but enough about that. I just want to talk to you a little bit more about the journey of starting a business, of raising capital and how to do it effectively. In 2025. I think there is a— there are a lot of grifters out there today that will tell you you need to be, you know, represented by someone in order to reach investors, etc. I think we're far enough into the tech— techno boom, uh, that we can— we can use technology to do a lot of this more effectively than having, uh, brokers, uh, represent and, uh, you know, these like expert, uh, people try and kind of become middlemen. Uh, just let your business speak for itself, let yourself speak for yourself, and, and, and, and basically pitch, uh, using data. Um, that's kind of the pitch I'm going to— I want to give to you today. And Flippa Invest is that. So, um, for anyone who's not familiar with, uh, Flippa itself, let me just give a brief background why Flippa is the perfect breeding ground for launching a fundraising platform. Flippa.com has been around for 16 years now. It has been and, and still is the kind of number one marketplace to buy and sell businesses. Some of you might think that it's acquire.com or it's Empire Flippers or it's FE International or another brokerage. Um, it's actually not when you look at volume, i.e., like GMV, like how much is, how much is traded, how many buyers and sellers interact, um, and are registered, and what's the liquidity. The most liquid marketplace online to buy and sell an online business, uh, a tech startup, is still flippa.com. Um, and we do deals between like $5,000 at the minimum, kind of like low end up to about $50 million. That's also a bit of an outlier. Usually the sweet spot is around like $100,000 to $10 million. So if you ever exit your startup for less than an IPO, then, you know, Flippa.com is certainly a path to achieve that. As I mentioned, my startup was acquired by Flippa, so it wasn't sold on Flippa. It was actually bought by Flippa. Um, and yeah, flippa.com has like a couple of million, uh, registered users. Uh, most of them are buyers, um, and a lot of them are institutional buyers, so family offices and private equity firms who use Flippa to, to, to kind of, you know, acquire and operate, like find and, and acquire businesses that they want to operate. Um, and we do over 100,000 acquisitions globally, or we facilitate them, you could say. And a majority, so two-thirds of those deals are actually cross-border, which I think is also pretty impressive. And that has to do with the fact that flippa.com was started in Australia and is now like— now we have one of our biggest offices is in Austin, Texas. We also have a big office in Amsterdam and Netherlands here in Europe, and then still our headquarters is in Melbourne in Australia. But Um, this gives you an idea of like, okay, there's a lot of activity going on at flippa.com in the M&A space. And, um, yeah, I could, I could talk, talk more about why maybe it's, it's, uh, it's very like tech-focused, right? We have a lot of searches for, um, like Shopify, SaaS, e-commerce, travel, YouTube, like a lot of like game, uh, mobile apps, AI, uh, categories that are being searched for. On Flippa. And the way we've kind of leveraged all this traffic, all this like intent data, is through AI to better match buyers with sellers. So if you list your business and you are looking to sell it, then buyers who have intent, we can more easily match to your business. And this is the technology that we've used from our M&A practice and are now using on Flippa Invest, um, which is basically a separate platform within Flippa's, like, suite of products that helps founders not exit but helps them raise growth capital. And we only work with digital businesses, i.e., tech startups that are doing online kind of like, uh, you know, not, not atom businesses but bits businesses. So we don't work with like hard tech. So if anyone here is on the call and they're doing like biotech in the most like physical sense, uh, with like big manufacturing facilities or, or anything like that, or you're launching rockets into space and stuff like that, I wish we could help you raise funds, but we have 80,000 accredited investors on Flippa Invest. And their expertise, most of them, lies in the digital realm. So more like software businesses, etc., and less so in the like physical brick-and-mortar hard tech realm. Um, so they're just not necessarily looking for that on Flippa Invest. Um, but let me tell you a little bit about how we do it, like how you can raise capital on Flippa Invest. For instance, there are a few other ways to raise money, obviously. Like AngelList or WeFunder. But I'm going to tell you about like how we try to create something that's a bit different to the alternatives out there. Um, we just launched this, by the way, so it's fairly new. It's probably why you haven't heard of it. You might have heard about Flippa, I don't know, but Flippa Invest is, is, is fairly, uh, nascent. And it is also, um, I think a better alternative to a lot of the existing stuff out there. That's why I kind of joined Flippa. I sold my business, was to try and create this, um, alternative to the venture path and as an alternative to bootstrapping. Because I myself bootstrapped. I raised some money, but I never raised VC money, and I'm very happy I didn't, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to sell my business for what I did. I would have had to have like a $100 million exit in order to please my investors on the cap table, had my investors been VCs. Um, so Flippa Invest is a platform with like data integrations. You can plug in your business performance KPIs to kind of show investors, you know, this is a real business. You know, I have traffic, I have users, I have customers, I have revenue, I maybe even have profit. Some of you guys, I'm not sure, but either way you can plug it in, you can demonstrate from Stripe from Google Analytics, from QuickBooks, etc., your traction metrics. Um, then we have, as I mentioned, the AI investor matching that we kind of use on the M&A side to match buyers and sellers. We use the same technology to match your round of fundraising with investors looking to deploy, uh, capital in, in growing startups. Um, and we have a deal room, so everything happens on the platform. Investors enter your deal room, they can do Q&A with you, you can share sensitive details, uh, after they sign an NDA. All of that happens in the deal room. You can sign term sheets and, and collect capital all on Fleva Invest. And yes, I mentioned you can sign documents, so share purchase agreements, safe notes, anything like that. And also, um, we can use our own escrow service to collect the capital and to fund your business, or we have an SPV provider, uh, where we can spin up an SPV and basically, uh, fund the SPV and fund your business through, uh, through, through that entity. Um, and they're called Sidecar. Um, but as I mentioned, we have 80,000 accredited investors, and these investors are a little bit different. Um, they have big wallets, but they're not, they're not your typical VC type investor, right? They are high net worth individuals, they are private equity funds, and they are family offices. And when they invest, they invest with a different mindset to your typical, um, VC investors. So business angels and VCs on AngelList will expect you to like 100x, uh, their, their initial investment typically. And that puts a pressure on you to create a decacorn, right? Sam Altman always says, like, invest and look for decacorns. And that's the mentality that goes into, you know, funding businesses like Uber and DoorDash. And that's great. Like, the world needs the Ubers and DoorDashes of the world. And I'm very, you know, fond of those businesses. Fact is, though, they're not profitable till this day. Um, even after they IPO'd. And, um, and, and, and I think, um, not every business needs to be an Uber or needs to be a DoorDash. And certainly there's a lot of investors out there who look for more like reasonable businesses, good businesses, healthy businesses, thriving businesses in, in the tech sector without expecting 100x or 1,000x return. And those are the type of investors that we have gathered 80,000 of, um, for you to raise from. And they, they might expect you to, you know, at some point pay a dividend once you turn profitable. They might expect you to 5x their initial investment or 10x, but it's a totally different mindset. Um, so they're not going to pressure you to grow or die. That's the typical dichotomy of a VC investor, is you, you know, like You push it as far as you can go, growth over everything, growth at all costs, and, um, you know, you IPO. And, um, I think, you know, along that journey you find a myriad of, uh, corpses of businesses that could have been good, like medium-sized businesses or large-sized businesses, but could not stand the test of becoming, you know, a public company. And so a lot of great businesses actually, there's a whole list of them actually online of businesses that could have been great profitable businesses, but chose not to be because they took VC investment. I can give you an example like Meetup, if you know that company meetup.com, no one uses it anymore really. But they were a good profitable business before. I think 1Password also on the path away from what it was. When it was a bootstrap business. And that's because the founders perhaps didn't have a place to go to raise capital from anyone else other than VCs. And so that's what Flip Invest tries to provide. And we're also— we're also— I just want to finish that before I talk about who's eligible to raise on Flip Invest. We're also not a crowdfunding platform. So we do exclusively have accredited investors. Meaning everyone on the platform who is investing has a net worth above $1 million. And that's not because we want to be like cool and exclusive, it's for legal reasons. To buy unlisted securities, you need to be accredited, or at least for us to facilitate these transactions. So we only allow— we, we do accreditation checks before they invest in your business to make sure that they are accredited. And you can engage with them in the deal room to see their profiles and like look at who you accept investment from, if you accept And who is eligible, right? Businesses that are US registered. That's an important detail. We have a legal partner at Flippa Invest that can help you turn your European business or your UK business or whatever into a US top co. So if you have a locally registered entity in your country, and you're not based in the US, they can help you set up a US entity and restructure so that entity in the US becomes the parent company. And at that point, you can raise capital on Flippa Invest even if you're not physically based in the US. So that's kind of the way we can get around if you have a company overseas. The second criteria is that you have growing revenues. I know some of you guys are not at that stage yet, And that's fine. Uh, one, once you get there, once you turn post-revenue, uh, and not, you know, are no longer pre-revenue, that's, that's the point where we have some data that we can plug in. As I mentioned, 20— it's year 2025. A lot of investors with the kind of like private equity angle, family office, or high net worth individual, they're looking for, you know, like a bit of like, uh, kept, uh, on like, uh, downside, you could call it, right? Like less risk in it associated with investing in the business. And the way to kind of prove that you're a real business and not just a pitch deck is by having revenue. Um, it's— and I think that the next thing is to be profitable, but I'm— that's not what we're asking. We're just asking you to have growing revenues. And then thirdly is like you're, you're, you're looking to raise between $50,000 and $1 million. We do allow oversubscription, so if you want to raise more than a million and there's interest for more than a million, you can raise more than, more than a million on Flippa Invest as well. But we don't— what we don't allow is for you to have a funding target above 1 million on our platform. But we, we have had businesses raise more than a million. It's just that, um, we, we would rather that you kind of aim lower and then score higher So we do cap it at $1 million. Yeah, so online businesses registered in the US with their company entity, growing revenues, seeking to raise between $50K and $1 million in funding targets. That's kind of where we are. I think the scope will increase and expand over time for us to have, you know, larger funding targets eligible for businesses. But at the moment, we cap it at $1 million. And here's one of the clients that raised just a quarter of a million, and he raised it in record time, 2 weeks. His name is Michael Fink. You can look him up. He's a really successful entrepreneur. He's done actually a lot of businesses. And yeah, he had some really, really nice words to say about the experience of raising on Flippa Invest. As he said, it's very fast. Obviously, he closed it in like, you know, really short amount of time, his round. But it's also good because— I'm paraphrasing here— but he, he, he liked the fact that we have the network of investors. So it's not like crowdfunding platforms where you have to bring, you know, your friends, your family members, your, your fools, your customers, uh, and, and have them like fund your business. So it's not, it's not that. Uh, we have the investors on the platform, and you just bring your terms of, of your round to the platform, um, and then we launch it and we market it to all of our users, all of the 80,000 accredited investors. Um, and again, we have, you know, over a million buyers on Flippa, but only 80,000 of those are accredited. So those are the ones that we will market your round to, uh, for, for collecting investment into your business. Um, and how does it work? Well, yeah, there's 4 steps to it. First thing you do is you apply to Raise. Um, so if you go to our website, you'll, you'll find that there's an intake form where you can, um, where you can, uh, submit some details about your business, um, and then we can hop on a call, um, to see if there's a fit. And then we collect all the information we need to, to kind of prepare your round, and then we launch it to our 80,000 accredited investors on the platform for them to get inside your deal room where they can engage with you and you can close investors at your own pace. And then, um, yeah, you engage with them and you, uh, you know, do Q&A, etc., and then finally, uh, you close to, to collect capital. And you could do that via an SPV, as I mentioned, We have an SPV provider, and for those of you not in the know, an SPV is a special purpose vehicle. It's a separate business entity where we pool investors so that they become one line item on your cap table. So it's just a very neat way of doing fundraising. Excuse me. So yeah, the direct raise is the way without using an SPV. So these are the two options we have, with and without. Without an SPV, you're basically responsible for onboarding investors directly through your cap table yourself. So it's more of a self-service experience versus the group raise or the SPV option here, where we pool investors under one entity for easier cap table management. Uh, for, and for the people who are not sure what I'm talking about here, um, ChatGPT gives a pretty good answer here, but it's, it's, it's It's basically just like, do you want investors directly on your cap table one by one, or do you want all the investors from this round that you're raising on Flippa Invest— do you want them as just one line item on your cap table, and then they get the same rights, all of them, under that SPV? So that's basically the, the difference here. Um, yeah, so we, we pride ourselves with— we have the like kind of fastest, biggest, easiest way to to raise capital, but also the, the, the lowest cost actually of the industry. Um, so in order to, to, to launch a round on Flippa Invest, um, it, it costs $3.5K. And you guys, because you are, um, alumni or, you know, existing batches of, uh, our partner Founder Institute, you'll get a discount of $500. So it costs $3, $3, $3 grand to launch a round. On Flippa Invest. And included in that is like all the, uh, you know, preparation of your round where you get a dedicated account manager who helps you. And then we launch it and we do all the marketing and solicitation of our 80,000 accredited investors. And then we— you basically do nothing except wait after we've launched it for the investors to start rolling into your deal room. And they'll sign NDAs before they enter your deal room so that you can engage with them freely and share information without worrying about, you know, the sensitive nature of that. Um, and then you can decide, like, do you want to do a direct raise or a group raise? And there are different, um, there's a different platform fee associated with it. Like, if you raise money, uh, with a direct raise, we have a 2.5%, um, of capital raised. And if you do a group raise with an SPV, we have a 4% of capital raised. But at the end of the day, these are not big numbers. If you compare them to AngelList or you compare them to WeFunder, you compare them to anything like crowdfunding or anything else, we have pretty low fees comparatively. But again, like, there are maybe better options out there for some of you guys depending on which stage you're at, what your budget is, and what type of business you're running. Like, if you're doing a consumer business, maybe crowdfunding is better than Flippa Invest. It depends on how big your your community is that you can raise from potentially if you wanna do that. But yeah, you can apply to raise growth capital at flippa.com/invest, and you can see some of the current businesses that are raising capital at the moment. So you can view the rounds on there. But yeah, I can also show you that, but maybe we should jump to Q&A now. I think I've talked enough.

Awesome. Let me jump on here. Thank you so much, Loretz. Perfect. Let's jump into Q&A. Let me switch it to side-by-side. If you guys have questions for Loretz, please drop it into the Q&A button. It's right below the messaging one. It allows me to bring up questions on stage. So I guess maybe I'll ask the first questions while we get the audience warmed up, Lourdes. Thanks for giving that overview on Flippa Invest and your background. So I actually didn't know about the direct versus group raise functionalities and all that other stuff, but I'd definitely be curious. You guys are seeing a lot of different things through Flippa and Flippa Invest. What are some of the general trends you're seeing? Are you seeing that more people are looking to get SaaS companies more funded versus e-commerce? Is there like, we're in 2025 now, is AI still a thing or is it the thing of the past? Is it AI, GPU, ML? Like, what are some of the things that are you seeing on the platform?

We're seeing AI businesses, uh, gain a lot of interest, um, because you can be an— you like, AI businesses have this ability apparently to be like a very neat and small operation in terms of headcount and still drive like amazing revenues and growth, which tended, I think in the past maybe to be a bit more of a, not a linear function, but certainly with like, if you wanted to grow, like the first thing you did was go and hire like 50 or 100 people. And that seems not to be the case. So I think, AI companies have an ability to use AI perhaps better than other companies. At least we're seeing, I mean, obviously there's also just a big demand for different AI applications. So I think they're like certainly very favorable amongst investors because they know they can be super profitable. And yeah, there's certainly a lot of hype, but I think a lot of the hype is real. I'm sure you've, I'm not the first to say that, but that's what we're seeing as well, that the hype is sort of real. So we're seeing some really good performances of AI startups that are also attracting investors. But SaaS is still golden. Like you can run a SaaS business without, without necessarily like trying to shoehorn AI into what you're doing. Like if it's not essential to your business, I wouldn't try and like, I wouldn't try and tag on AI just as if like, you know, if crypto gets hot again, like don't try to tag on crypto if it's not related. Um, but yeah, we're seeing SaaS still doing really well. Mobile apps are doing really well. And finally, uh, content. So we're also like, we're also seeing businesses that are building empires on, on YouTube, like just YouTube channels with added like certain ways, like, uh, revenue streams from, from, you know, different channels like merch. Um, and that kind of bleeds over into e-commerce, but I, I don't Like, I'm not going to say that e-commerce is hot. And also, like, blogs are also not like— but newsletters are. So there's, there's like different ways that you can run an e-commerce now, but you need to have distribution for e-commerce. Like, you can't just be— it's very hard at least to be just e-commerce without having some kind of content, uh, like media business attached to it. That's what, that's what investors like anyway. So a distribution is still key. That's why e-commerce is not like the hottest thing for investors, uh, nor, nor is blogs anymore. You need to have either like a newsletter or a YouTube presence or something like that that's driving traffic and driving customers for whatever product you're selling. Um, so yeah, awesome.

Thanks. Um, I'm still seeing some questions come in. I'll get to them shortly. The other question I wanted to ask is specifically on growth capital versus angel investing. You kind of brushed over it, I think, in slide 3 or 4, maybe for the audience who's not as knowledgeable. Do you want to, like, talk about the difference between growth capital and versus angel investing and, like, how that's a bit different and where Flippa Invest can particularly help in that?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I mentioned our eligibility criteria, so our, like, you can call them investment criteria, right? This is not our investment criteria. These are on behalf of our mandate, so our 80,000 investors. They— what they look for when deploying growth capital is a business with traction, so with growing revenues, because that suggests that you have figured out a way to make money, uh, and if you apply more capital, i.e., growth capital, you can make more money. Whereas angel investing is, okay, I have, I have, I have maybe an idea and a friend from college, and we've built this presentation here, and we've done a little bit of research, but like, who knows if this will work out? Like, it's like, you know, uncapped upside and totally like, you know, uncapped downside in a way in that, you know, we can lose all the money. There's nothing to suggest that we won't, maybe. And that's, that's the difference really. Growth capital is like, okay, there's some kind of formula Or there's some kind of like, you know, customer base that we can grow or, you know, the product here that's, you know, you know, that's already been adopted that we can, that we can scale. And so that's really, I think, the critical difference also between perhaps what Flippa Invest offers and what like a site like AngelList offers is like you're at a different stage maybe but you're also perhaps not necessarily trying to force a decacorn out of your business. Um, and that's, that's where I think it's very favorable to have investors from FlipaInvest on your cap table who are not— we're not going to try and force you, uh, to become something that perhaps is not in the cards for your business. I'm not saying it, it can't be in the cards, but like, it's this like all-or-nothing dichotomy that we're trying to trying to change and create an alternative path for funding.

Awesome, thanks so much. And I guess my last question before I go, and we'll do a couple audience Q&A, and then we'll break out for networking, is you talk about this direct versus group raise. That's the first I'm seeing something like that, where it's like, hey, you can have multiple individuals, which is the standard on your cap table, or you can have maybe like, you can group them up, put them into an SV, SPV, and then that sits as one line item. What are advantages and disadvantages of doing a group versus a direct?

Well, if you do an SPV— an SPV is also known as a roll-up vehicle, uh, it's an RUV, um, but yeah, they're also called, um, FPVs, uh, which can stand for either special purpose vehicle or single purpose vehicle because What it essentially is, is, um, a, a company entity, usually an LLC. So you— we actually create a new company, and then, um, the cap table of that company will be all the investors who are investing in your round. So that round will get its own company, and then that company will invest the money collected from that fundraising round into your business. That is raising capital, right, into your operating business. And so in, in that sense, every investor becomes a, a shareholder in the SPV, uh, and you as the founder only get one investor on your cap table, which is that entity, that SPV. And the, the benefits of doing it this way is that, uh, we will manage the filings of the SPV, uh, like the, the reg de stuff as well as like tax and, and other considerations that you would have to do yourself if you did a direct raise. Because there are certain, like, under Reg D, um, you, like, in the US SEC guidelines, you have to file when you, when you do a private, a private placement, private offering, uh, and, and raise capital in your business. Um, if you manually onboard them to, to your cap table, we will manage all the filing stuff for you if you do it through an SPV. That's an more of a managed service, if you will, versus the direct raise where you are responsible for, for all the filings associated with that raise and the onboarding of the investors to your cap table.

Okay, no, that's super helpful. Thanks for giving that breakdown. So we have a few questions here. Some of them are kind of repeat, so I'll just cherry-pick some of them. Um, I like this one. So Juan from Chicago is asking how much revenue Do you kind of need to qualify for the platform?

So we actually— what was the name of the guy from Chicago?

Juan.

Juan. Juan. There's not a minimum. The reason we didn't put a minimum is because if you're doing, let's say, you know, $5,000 MRR as a SaaS business, it's very different to if you're doing you know, $5,000 monthly revenue as, uh, as like an e-commerce. All right, if you have a— like, the, the margin tends to be very different. Uh, so we, we didn't go into, um, we didn't go into like putting a hard like, uh, floor to the minimum revenues. Uh, we kind of view it on a case-by-case. And again, I would say, you know, if you're doing, you know, $5,000 in revenue, uh, as a fast business, but you were doing like $4,000 5 years ago in monthly recurring revenue, then you know, it's not like you're not really growing very fast. And so, but then at the same time, if you're doing $5,000 MRR, you know, this month, but you were doing $1,000 MRR like 3 months ago or 6 months ago, then it suggests that you're growing quite fast. And that's a sign where it's like, okay, you might have a bit of a low revenue, but you're growing at a pretty fast pace, which makes for a good case for Flippa Invest still.

Awesome, yeah, we just had another question here by Chris who was asking about the traction metrics. I think you just answered that, but like Chris from Oakland's asking, what's a good traction metric? Like, do you have a hard and fast rule, or is it just based on your trail on like the previous like months that are—

So again, we're a bit early into the fundraising game. We've been in the M&A game for, yeah, as I mentioned, over a decade and a half. Well, we know more about what a great business looks like for, you know, getting acquired than what a great business looks for, I'm just gonna be honest, for like raising capital. We're learning a lot from the first businesses that have gone through and raised money, what investors are looking for, what they're not looking for. Obviously, it's seasonal. You know, it depends on whatever, like, the, like, you know, US president, US presidency is dictating for, you know, everything like tariffs and geopolitics that can kind of move the market in certain ways that we're not in control over. But I would say, as I mentioned, like, if you have growing revenues, um, that's like the— that's the first green flag we look for. Um, so it, it could be that you're, as I mentioned, generating only a little bit of revenue, uh, with a high growth rate, or vice versa, you're great generating a higher revenue with a lower growth rate. Both of those things, like, are, are great, um, on Flippa Invest. So there's not like— and I would, I would say the, the third thing is You know, you could be generating very little revenue, but you could be super lean and have like a high margin on your revenue. And then that's also a good indicator for FlipaInvest. But I would say if you're the kind of business that, you know, spends, you know, $5 million to make, you know, $500,000 in revenue, I don't think it's a good fit for FlipaInvest because you're not capital efficient and you're just like, you're gonna die because you're burning money. And so that's a red flag. That might be a green flag actually, by the way, for a VC. It's like, oh yeah, like you're just throwing money in, you know, at a burning dumpster. And that's a green flag for them. That's a red flag on FIBA Invest.

Yeah, perfect. Let's— Mark from Bellevue is asking what are the terms associated to the— on the platform, essentially?

Uh, terms are, uh, so we're not— we're, we're non-exclusive. So if you want to raise money, um, in fact, a lot of my clients, um, on Flippa Invest are raising bigger rounds. And what they've done is, okay, they've allocated a certain amount to Flippa Invest. So they're, you know, one of them is trying to raise $3 million, and they want to raise, uh, half a million on Flippa Invest because they have signed commitment for 2.5 from VC investors actually. So they're looking for a different type of investor and a smaller check size from Flippa, Flippa Invest. And so, yeah, like you can raise money from elsewhere. In fact, you can go on a crowdfunding platform as well and try and raise money there and still have a round of Flippa Invest. It's not like we're gonna like demand that you raise every dime that you want to for your round on Flippa Invest. You can have your round be broader and bigger outside of the platform, but we do have a cap of $1 million as a funding target. And I would say I often advise founders to go below the $1 million cap. Again, I just think it sends a signal, but also depends on where you are in your, like, founding journey and your company journey. If you're raising a million and you're only generating, I don't know, like, uh, $60,000 a year in revenue, that, it's that, that, that's who some investors can look a bit like, uh, unbalanced or a bit, well, yeah. So, so just keep in mind, um, that again, we're not like, it's not VC investors on here. So you really need to like have, uh, some kind of proof that you're a good operator, uh, based on, based on the traction of your business, or obviously like also your, your, like, what's your business What's your experience from the past? Have you run other businesses? Have you grown other businesses, et cetera? So there's a lot of factors, but yeah, we're not exclusive. The terms are you can raise, as I mentioned, we have a fixed launch fee where you guys get a discount and then we have a percentage, like a relative platform fee depending on how much you raise that we charge. And then otherwise, yeah, that doesn't, like all the terms are on our website. You can just go ahead and read them. Cool.

Let's do a few more and then we can break out for networking. Um, a pair of us— this is a bit meta, but, uh, do you guys invest in marketplaces as well?

Yeah, obviously. Yeah, for sure. Like, I, I ran a marketplace. I have a big, um, um, like, uh, like, love for online marketplaces. Um, I think they're very ambitious. I think if you can get them working, they're like basically unstoppable, um, if you get like critical mass, um, and, you know, liquidity. Um, but, uh, yeah, we, we have, uh, we actually have one marketplace that's, that's raising capital on Flippa Invest right now, and I would say that is one of the most popular businesses, uh, in the current, uh, batch. Um, so we tend to launch like a few businesses, like a handful of rounds every month, uh, for investors to, to kind of get like a new, like a fresh set of rounds to consider. And the current batch, one of those is the marketplace. So long or short, short answer is definitely yes.

Awesome. You briefly mentioned for overseas companies you'd help them incorporate in the US and do the whole thing. Are there any tax implications to your knowledge of doing that, or like, how is that structured? Again, whatever you're comfortable sharing. I know it's a bit of a semi-legal and accounting question. This is from— this is Ken from the Bay Area.

Yeah, Ken, for sure. You can definitely bank that there will be— I mean, you're in the Bay Area, I mean, but okay, maybe you're just visiting the Bay Area or your company is registered abroad. But the answer is yes, there are tax implications. I am not a tax attorney. I'm also not a legal advisor or anything like that. So I would say speak to our partner about that. But the answer is usually yes, because what you're doing is you're taking your foreign business entity and you're basically making it a subsidiary of your newly registered top company or parent company in the US, and the revenues, uh, and, and everything else that flows and used to flow via your— or in— into your local company entity abroad will now need to flow into the US entity, uh, you maybe via that entity as well, unless you do a direct, um, so, um, so a direct like funneling of the funds. But I would, I would just say The short answer is yes, typically there are tax implications for your, like, you know, company tax, like corporate tax level. And for your personal, like income tax and stuff like that, I'm not entirely sure if there'll be any implications. It really depends on where you pay yourself out as, you know, maybe a founder, like salary. Like I myself had a holding company where I would pay out like dividend as my salary. So I think it depends on what kind of structure you've set up. And so it's always on a case-by-case kind of basis that our legal partner, which they're called SeedLegals, by the way, SeedLegals, they're like London-based, but they have US offices in New York and so on. So they have US operations and they help you set up Delaware companies and kind of restructure everything from your, uh, company overseas.

Awesome. Um, I think we're— we actually know Seedly Goods pretty well. They're a partner of ours at the SV chapter for Founder Institute. Uh, awesome. This has been super helpful. Um, most of the other questions is regarding pre-seed, which I like— just to reiterate for what Loris was talking about with Flip Invest, you need to be generating revenue. If you're pre-seed, you do not qualify. And yeah, I think the other questions is about like registration around LLCs in the US and other companies there, which I believe you went over. We can break out for networking now as we have about 15 minutes. You know, we hit about 193 people live at one point, we're about 172. So we should have a good amount of people sticking on for networking. I'll share the link one last time over here for the Flip Invest. If there's anyone who wants to learn more, feel free to go click that link. I also shared Loretz, let me do it again, LinkedIn. He's a friendly guy, I'm sure you can hit him up for questions. I guess just to wrap up here, Loretz, any last piece of advice you wanna give the founders here specifically around fundraising?

Yeah, I would say don't obsess over fundraising. Like, I think it's a distraction at the end of the day. I know like some of you guys might be building businesses that require actual funding, but a lot of you, I reckon, will build businesses that just require a lot of like, a lot of like, like hard work and long hours. And so I think FlipaInvest is a good It's a good option for anyone who's busy running a business and just doesn't wanna like cold outreach to 80,000 accredited investors, but would rather have, you know, their like business just shown in the best light possible and get investors into their deal room to actually close. So yeah, I would say don't obsess over fundraising and then, you know, try to get revenue and try to get revenue. It's the best like proof that you're not wasting your time as well. Paul Graham says it best, like, you know, it's like you can spend all this time building product, like just launch it, ship it, get it out into the world, figure out how to sell it. Very important, distribution, as I mentioned. People sometimes, especially first-time founders, and I was one of those guys that like kind of like thought product was more important and then learned that actually no, distribution is king. So just like distribution, before product and then just ship it. Don't, don't, don't spend years building something that nobody wants.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So we'll wrap up here. I'm going to end the session. We'll break out for networking. Hopefully you've gotten value from today's webinar and we have a bunch of other ones coming up. I'll drop the link also in the chat, fi.co/events. If you're registered, you'll probably see some upcoming events. We have a lot of investor AMAs and a bunch of other stuff that's coming up, so hopefully we see you at those. Loris, thank you so much for taking the time out and telling us a little bit about your journey and about Flip Invest and walking us through these different mechanisms to raise, especially around the growth capital stuff and the different ways you can raise with angels or on your platform. So that was very helpful. I'm gonna end the session here. We'll break out for networking and hopefully see you out on the tables. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Bye. Thank you.