Q&A Part 2 | Amanda Bradford

Can you just talk more about your fundraising and sort of the timeline and when you decided you needed fundraising and just sort of that process of your first round?

Yeah, let me see if I can go back to that little timeline thing I made. Yeah, so I would say basically here, while I did all of these things, you're also like, what's not on here is coffee meeting, coffee meeting, coffee meeting, coffee meeting, email that no one wrote back to, email that no one wrote back to. There's a bunch of, investor BD happening at the same time. We closed our round. We ended up raising $2.5 million in January, mid-end of January, but most of it didn't come in until like the very— as fundraising, as what happens with fundraising, it's really hard to get kind of the first tranche, but then once everybody starts to come in, it's really kind of quite easy to get almost oversubscribed. So that same thing happened to us. We were trying to get up to $1 million. So I was working on that this whole time, and then once we got there around December, January, the round grew at the last second to like $2.5 million. So that being said, I think some of the big things we did well was I, from this beginning, I started collect— basically, you kinda wanna collect as many VC email addresses, meet as many as you can. You wanna go breadth at the beginning. And just start getting a directory of like 20 to 30 people that you think are gonna be potentially a good fit. And that's a whole other kind of calculus of like which VCs to pitch, which probably we don't really have the scope to cover now, unless we do it at the end. But, so anyway, once you kind of decide your target list of VCs, I would say, you know, you meet them all right away. And then what you're doing is this whole time you're storytelling, right? You're telling them about all the things you've been doing, all the metrics you're gonna hit in August. Then when you hit them in August, you tell them you hit them in August, what you're gonna do in September. You hit it in September. You do it— I mean, it's work, right? They saw like 6 to 7 months of progress, of hustling, of hitting the goals that we set out to, and hitting aggressive goals. And I think that's the true way to fundraise, I think. You can also do some of the crazy ones where you just beat your chest and someone gives you $10 million. I haven't figured out how to do that. But there's definitely people in this Valley that can. But this is sort of the way to do it when you want kind of the— your work to speak for yourself, and you don't really necessarily want— or trying to sell someone down the river. You're just saying, like, I'm a founder that you should back because I am saying I'm gonna do things and I'm doing them, and it's been 7 months, and every metric I said we're gonna hit, we hit. So people start to really get confidence in you. And so that was my strategy.

What are some of the challenges that you faced before launching the app and right after 3 months?

Before launching the app, I think it's all tech, right? Mobile app development is actually quite costly and difficult, so we had a pretty novice developer, so there's a lot of unforeseen tech challenges that we didn't account for, which is— I'm really happy we ended up oversubscribing our round, 'cause that money goes straight into that. So I'd say just sort of double. You always expect 2 to 3x the time it takes for any technical project. And then I think right after, Again, it was tech challenges, so then we started having scaling issues 'cause we had our users. It was good problems. It was good to have scaling issues. That's what they say. But then that's where the $2.5 million went into rebuilding that app pretty much right away. I think we raised the round in January and we started rebuilding it in May. So I would say the— and I think we did it the fine way because we basically fundraised on an MVP and then we took the funds fundraising money to actually rebuild the MVP, so it's no longer an MVP and it's a V1. So that's one way to do it, but you do lose some time on the back end. So we did lose some time in 2015 because of that strategy, but it's also less risky than spending a ton of money up front on your product and then finding out no one wants to use it. So we chose to do cheap and lean and then see what happened. Any other questions? I'm trying to think if there's any other appendix slides. Well, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, most of the time when you're doing local, local marketing is quite different than online or national. So most of these brick-and-mortar places have regional marketing arms. They're almost sitting— if they're not sitting in the office, there's like a headquarters in SF that everybody works at. So it's actually quite local. So it's actually a benefit for if you are doing local or regional launches because you don't have to go to the headquarters of SoulCycle and ask them for approval. There's a person that's like me who's kind of GM of SoulCycle SoMa or whatever. And so I get to choose sort of how to spend my marketing budget as a GM. And so It's club owner, Crunch, Equinox, all of those people have authority to make profit and loss decisions. And so, it's about figuring out what their business models are. How many people did you have on your team during these first couple months that were helping? One. I was full-time and the guy I had was a contractor. So, yeah. And I had friends help out. And I had a lot of— I leaned on my friends a lot. So I had a lot of fake League workers.

Yeah.

And I was like, I'll pay you later when we have money. So I owe them now. But yeah, I kept it really lean. I think hiring— I am a big proponent of not hiring until you literally are up to your ears in work and you can't sleep. And then you hire. Because I think you need to know what the job is, how it works, how to do it well, and then Hiring is sort of the reward for that. Awesome. Cool. Well, my email's amanda@theleague.com. So if you guys have any questions, I'm happy to follow up with any other questions you might not have thought about. But thanks for letting me come today. That was fun.

Thank you.