How do you raise a $12M Series A with Mark Cuban?

welcome to episode 35 of fundraising Dem mystified today we have Nick quomo former Pro orts Gamer turned co-founder and CEO of all star. he recently announced his $12 million series a after raising a seed during the peak of 2021 Nick has an inspiring background as a former pro orts player way back in the early Counter-Strike days then pursued a marketing career to then launch his startup shortly before the pandemic we talk about the rise of orts how the capital raising markets changed dramatically from 2021 to 2023 the impact of open ai's latest Sora announcement on his business and how he's focused on hitting his kpis to attract Capital as a reminder to get notified of our weekly podcast and newsletters be sure to subscribe at join. thunder. BC again that's join. thunder. BC now on to the show hey everyone welcome back to fundraising demystified today we are welcoming Nick Cuomo on the show today CEO and co-founder of all star. welcome to the show Nick thanks Jason uh glad to be here appreciate you having me I'm excited to to share your story you've uh raised a couple rounds of financing most recently A series a uh mid last year and would love for the audience to get to know you and kind of a little bit about your your background your story and ultimately what led you to starting Allstar yeah totally so um I'm a former Pro Gamer I played Counterstrike in high school and college and obviously left a very big impression on me I started this company sometime later and um when I played my CL of Fame was I made videos that um went viral before YouTube and twitch were really a thing uh the next tournament I went to I could just sense kind of the room shifted people wanted to talk to me that didn't even know my name and everyone was interested to see how I played so it left a really big impr on me and it wasn't until kind of much later in my life and career that I actually looked back on that experience and and thought you know actually I was very lucky because my ability to create content really came from the fact that I was creative I was technical I always had a fast computer I had a lot of free time so it was fun I enjoyed making content I enjoyed Distributing it uh for most Gamers it's not fun it's labor intensive it's hard work and so we started Allstar in 2019 to change that and our mission unchanged to this day is to enable any gamer to be a Creator and uh what we're doing is we build technology that makes sharing your gameplay simpler than posting a selfie so that's kind of how we uh got into this thing in the first place and yeah we just um we're all Gamers you know we love to make creating content easier and more fun and uh that's what we've been doing for the last couple years n appreciate you giving that context you know I I always find it interesting kind of the OG Esports before Esports was even branded Esports uh you know passionate gamer yeah you kind of early on that that industry but you know looking at your your history and your career like obviously that was way back when you know you had a a full career leading up to to Allstar so kind of what was you know what was kind of the general sentiment of your career leading up to to Allstar yeah so I I met a lot of um really great people in Esports that kind of helped me early in my career some of the first jobs I did outside of like working at my dad's General Store on Long Island as a kid and 7-Eleven after that was um I did like jobs in Esports I'd go run tournaments and do admin and set up events and I used to pitch dust off at the Samsung Experience in New York City and stuff like that uh these are all like jobs I got through people I met in Esports but then uh you know for me I kind of after Esports I went to college and I actually had to kind of retire from orts I basically had to choose if I wanted to graduate from school or continue to be competitive because both took the same amount of time so I I hung up the mouse in uh I think it was 2004 maybe 2006 I forget but um basically retired from Esports focused on school I'm a graphic designer by trade so my background is you know I used to design en code websites I'd sell them to you know small businesses um my first one was to my graphic design teacher in high school and uh actually got to do some really interesting work for Brands like in Nidia and NASCAR through some of my Esports connections kind of freelanced for a few years used to have some contractors that would work with me so I was always like an entrepreneur by default that was kind of my first instinct was to work for myself and uh then I decided to try working for someone else I got into graphic design worked at a digital studio called uh blue found media became uh you know an agency uh in New York that did everything from like marketing to mobile apps to website was there for a little over four and a half years I was a senior account director ran like a third of that company and learn the ins and outs of digital marketing product development you know teams and everything in between and then most recently was at movable Inc which is a venture back software as a service company in in New York and uh they taught me the ins and outs of SAS sales and uh I got to you know lead some of their sales teams and really um just learned a ton about being on the inside of a venture back software company and seeing how uh how that kind of thing develops and scales and grows and I think we went from like 10 to close to 100 million in ARR while I was there I think it was like a employee 75 there was something like 300 employees by the time I left think they have 600 now and um they're doing great and yeah really just kind of fell in love with startups and I saw an opportunity in the industry I saw a lot of my Esports connections starting companies getting funded I saw this momentum in the industry you know when I played our big stadium was like a shopping mall you know it's like families to go into a Best Buy would be like why are these you know children shouting in the middle of the shopping mall and uh and that was Esports back then that was the local tournaments that we practice in to try to go to the big National ones and um so now I saw that they were filling stadiums up like the barlay center near my house in Brooklyn I was like okay I kind of feel drawn to this I saw a big opportunity I I still played games um I still had moments I'm not as good as I used to be but I wanted to share content with my friends I just was not satisfied by anything that was out there and that's kind of what got me into into gaming and into Allstar again then ultimately um you know I think my my skill sets at the time I felt like I was I was prepared I kind of knew how to execute I felt like I knew how to I knew the people we needed I could recruit that team I could build that product and um you know get things uh going in the right direction I think that's a very well articulated Journey that you just walked us through of kind of accumulating the necessary experience to then allow you to go out and build something that's align with your passion um so you appreciate you getting that context and and not all founders are like that I've met a lot of Founders that are just like you know I was 22 I dropped out of college and like you know I I just don't think I was cut out for that you know I felt like um everyone has their own Journey but I think it's totally valid to be like yeah I'm gonna go have a 10-year career in something first then I'm gonna find my problem and I'm going to take that experience with me and I'm going to start my first company in my 30s or something like that I think there's no one template to you know being a Founder 100% so it's 2019 you're set on launching Allstar to kind of solve this problem of making it easy to clip which which I had experience I've have you know gaming background been in the gaming industry clipping is prohibitive you know prior to tools like yours and uh it became like I I would like oh I did something cool like I'm not going to be able to editing that try to that no way so yeah yeah as a as a user in the space I I know the the problem uh I see myself really just sometimes just taking pictures of I thought of the at least the victory fter I mean that's why everyone shares selfies right you have a you know an AI powered you know three lens you know high-end photo tool in your pocket and you can whip that out wherever you are whenever you want to take a picture there's a bunch of tools in gaming but none of them are that easy and and the byproduct is is never that good because you know it's just what you see is what you get it's you know relying on your Hardware it's relying on your you know abilities to edit that content that takes time or money and um that's just not what like gaming is all about so this is not what I usually do in the in the podcast but just given the timeliness of kind of the the application use of your technology and opening eyes new announcement for Sora yeah I'm curious kind of how that could complement your your product or be competitive to your your product or to your users just curious to kind of get your overall take on the the new announcement yeah no we were talking about it in slack just this morning it's um I have a few takes on AI first I think it's um it's really cool it seems like super interesting it's powerful it's a little scary right I mean you know what happens when you can just you know um simulate video out of thin air and you could make anything you know there's a lot of implications to that and I think um Only Time Will really tell what what all that means I think in the context of you know taking it back to just gaming and Allstar I think it's going to make our ability to deliver really compelling Creator tools and to kind of and one of the things we've always done is like democratize gaming content so kind of level the gap between your professional Gamers and your top creators and everybody else and that's everyone else is why gaming is the biggest form of entertainment on Earth why it's over2 200 billion dollars a year it's you've got you know the 99% of Gamers that watch the twitch streamers that are streaming you know content on Tik Tok they are um playing the games right they're spending money in the games and they're spending money around the game so that's our market and I think the more that you can make it uh faster and cheaper and easier and more fun to make content that is uh is on par or closer to or better than what the professionals are able to make you're just going to get better content for more people faster you're going to level the playing field you'll have a new generation of creators so super excited by it um definitely interested to see how it develops my other theory is I think like CG and movies as we see the next gen like you know it's day one right we just saw it this morning so it's like oh my God this looks like a real stock video I think the human brain adapts to this stuff in a cycle that has continued to do since you know we went from like clation to you know computer generated imagery which is that at first it tricks your mind into thinking it's real but then your brain sort of your you know general intelligence catches up and we start to see I remember the first iteration of generative AI video was like holy crap oh my God I'm so frightened and then you start to decode that and your brain is like just look at the fingers and you know you can see the weird shifting pixels and it's kind of you know it's not that mysterious so I'm curious because it's it's very close to like can you distinguish that right um but that that's my my take my theory is you know the more computers trick our minds that our minds sort of catch up and can start to kind of tell facts from fiction and I think you see that with movies and special effects yeah no I think uh it's an interesting perspective and I yeah I agree with that sentiment appreciate you kind of entertaining that that tangent to to talk about a yeah it's a really interesting I mean it was yeah we were talking all about it's crazy stuff it's it's it's unbelievable how fast AI is progressing it's been like a year I know it really and it's yeah it's uh you know seems like it's speeding up so we'll see where that goes so let's get back to to Allstar so yeah 2019 you at some point you you rais some money let's talk about where you're at when you first start to raise money who you're going to and kind of how what was that process so the first time we were like let's go raise money um we still had jobs and we were like we're going to go pitch investors they're going to be so amazed by our our idea our plan our background that you know we'll go and quit our jobs once we close the first funding uh that's not how it works the investors right away were like well if you're not all in how can I be all in we're like that makes sense we should have thought of that so um you know like crazy Founders were like let's go all in and we just put in our notice and um just you know got completely dedicated and bootstrap basically for the first 18 months without salary myself and my co-founder um Gavin our CTO and uh and then we started pitching and you know we'd pitch the VCS and you know listen I I know a lot about sales I have a lot of sales experience my experience with fundraising is that it's very different than sales until you've gotten kind of used to it and then there are some overlaps between sales skills and fundraising skills but it's it's very different your your ability to sell software and your ability to sell a company to an investor are to totally different skill set so it took me a little bit to kind of figure that out and and understand that you know there's a different approach and a different sort of threshold of what the investor really wants to understand the language that they speak and how to really paint the picture in a way that makes it uh easy for an investor to decide so we started pitching our preed uh you know we it was very clear it's like all right we got to get some friends and family first um you know we're first-time Founders you know we're um you know from uh I guess humble beginnings you know Blue Collar kind of families and um so we're you know raising money from uh friends and family and just uh you know people we've worked with and people we know and and we started to raise uh half of our preed that way and then around that time uh one of our um actually our our uh attorney Neil fredman uh fredman Law Firm he uh he was one of our earliest investors and I remember when he wanted to invest I was Googling I'm like can your lawyer invest in your startup CU I had no idea I was like sure I'd love to so they can and he did uh and he uh through his wife actually they have a connection to uh Mark cubin like they did some work together and so she sent our preed materials uh over to Mark and I was just about to leave for uh my uh engagement vacation first vacation in like years for my then girlfriend now wife and you know Neil calls me and he's kind of in a panic he's like Mark replied he questions he's interested I'm like okay let's get on a call let's bang out a response and they're like calling her name at the gate and long story short he said yes she said yes it was not a very relaxing vacation but um yeah I got to you know go through Mark diligence you know Mark cubin to diligence process uh in Florence Italy on my giant loud gamer laptop for a week uh and and then he uh shortly after committed and actually oversubscribed our our preed and and then people started to take us a little more seriously because you know um at first everyone's like you quit your jobs to do what video game Clips like yeah yeah yeah it's a big huge Market big idea big problem then once you know Mark Cuban put his money behind us people like oh that's a really cool idea maybe uh can I get in on that and um so that that was our precede that was the first kind of funding round and so learned a lot learned fast um had to be Scrappy and uh you know it was just a taste of everything to come I mean I had to offer that you know if Mark wanted me to fly to Texas the next day to like continue the conversation I'm going to offer that and I had to clear that with my you know now fiance I was like if he says yes like the my my part of this trip is over like I got to get on the plane and she was like absolutely and um yeah it's also a lesson having good partners as a mission critical for a successful founder is if you're not single make sure you got a good partner uh partner they're opting in for the experience as well not it's a team sport so yeah so you have Mark Cuban on board what's it like having mark cubin on your cap table uh I mean he's a great investor he doesn't really bother us and he's there if we need help and you know he's he's reinvested with us um he doesn't reinvest all the time but um he has reinvested with us and he's usually the first person to open our newsletters and emails I don't know how he does it but I think that's probably why he is so successful is he's just smart fast hardcore always working and um he's he's great I mean it his superpower was his how quickly he could understand I think what we were doing why we were doing it that way what made it special and you know I've never met him we don't talk on the phone it's just all email which I love because I'm a very fast typist and I'm all about email and I love getting business done in writing because then there's no confusion about what was said uh and things just move I think more efficiently and so um yeah he's been um he's been really great I mean we we've called on him a few times for a variety of different situations where we needed an intro or help or advice and um he's always answered the call and I can't say that that is to be expected out of all investors and especially someone as as you know accomplishes him that's phenomenal that's great to hear and it's uh it's good that his reputation stays strong um so you raise this round you get you know you struggle a little bit but you get Mark keeping on board things start to follow in how much money did you raise and and what and then what timeline were was this on 45k so it was a meager precede uh timeline was probably that was our quick was maybe three or four months I think it was like kind of a rolling close just closed a bunch of safes and um you know so we're learning what a safe is and how to close a safe as we're you know going through this process and um yes that was you know pretty pretty simple straightforward and the plan with that was just to have enough um you know cash to just execute and so we didn't pay ourselves anything at that point and and that was just enough for us to kind of hire our first uh team members and uh invest in things like an office and invest in things like servers and infrastructure and marketing and starting to validate product Market fit and just um you know putting that money to work and uh you know at this point is your co-founder a technical person are you technical like how how did you guys bu CTO so um yeah Gavin and I met at uh blue found media it's the agency we both worked at I actually hired him onto my accounts team and it was just very obvious from day one that he was a very different kind of account director because if a website crash crashed he would just open a terminal window and the website would UNR and all my other account directors had to like file a ticket and wait for the PM to wake up in the morning and uh he would just be like you know I got it so he's very smart very technical um super you know sort of uh uh you know super engineer could do a lot of different things and uh we bonded over old school PC games we both played Counter Strike and Dungeon Keeper and theme hospital we just you know were hardcore PC Gamers of which I ran into you know seldom that many in my career in New York so we hit it off and I always felt like if I was going to start a company someday probably be with him because there was kind of like a complimentary thing where I was very creative and aspirational and you know I could kind of dream big and he was very technical and methodical and sort of realistic and grounded and so you know between the two of us there's enough kind of like ambition and you know creative technical uh executional you know reality where we can just get some really interesting things done and so the first you know version of the product was you know designed by me uh built by him you know we brought in some uh some support to build some of the parts of the product that got a little crazy and um yeah so he's yeah still CTO to this day and he's got a quite a large engineering team on his hands no that's a that's good to hear and I feel like that's something I always like to understand because a lot of Founders like do I need a co-founder do I need a technical co-founder it helps a lot to to be able raise money highly recommend the co-founder Dynamic um you know three founders might even be uh better than that I know two and three I think you know just statistically the data says that uh you know businesses with more than one founder startups are are more successful I forget where I read this but don't quote me on it but I'm quite sure SCI yes I think it was like put out by like injury soon or something like that and um so they they look for those kind of profiles and it's a it's a very tough game so having someone to lean on that's going through that Journey that knows how hard it is and you know you can support each other at different points in that journey and um that that has been invaluable and has nothing to do with execution that's just like your relationship and and your ability to just be supportive so moving on you got the preed you started working on on stuff I think it's around covid time that this is stuff all coming through how did you complete because basically raised I think it was about $4 million seed in total so imagine that little under that uh so kind of walk us through at what point did you decide to raise more money what was that experience what was that process yeah so I think the um timeline if I'm remembering correctly was we're probably six months into our precede Runway I think we had like 18 months based on what we had raised and our plan and then we were starting to see some really great traction so we were seeing a lot of validation in user data we're seeing like compounding growth um great feedback so was like okay we're on to something this feels electric um great time to go raise the market uh itself uh I think you know covid so we originally were going to raise sooner than we did um but then covid happened and you know at the very onset of covid that was not the good times you know like if you were in Media or remote technology or gaming it was really the second year of covid that people started to open up their wallets again and and there was you know um Capital to deploy right when Co hit everyone was you know running for the hills and no one really knew what was happening next to the world so that was when we wanted to launch our Original Seed round so we had to kind of extend things we delayed our plans a little bit it was 2021 uh remember end of 2020 we launched the process over like Christmas time and uh you know really just started activating my network building up my list of investors getting the pitch materials together and uh I think in my experience it takes around like 90 days to really get prepared to raise because execution and fundraising are just not compatible they're just totally different processes and you need to be completely in the fundraising mindset and you need time to translate execution into fundraising and and then you have to be methodical and that was the one sales skill that transferred over was like build your lists get your intros you know run your pipeline and and we kind of kicked off uh generally an eight-week process and uh we pitched a lot of different investors VCS Angel groups and uh it ended up that uh New York Angels who we applied to and had multiple sort of intro paths who were a new york-based company um they were compelled to write a term sheet I remember in the initial pitch meeting it was kind of intimidating it was on Zoom but there was like 85 investors on there and you had 10 minutes and I think it took me like four all nighters to get our 30 minute pitch down to 10 minutes because that's that's tough we have very complicated there's a lot to explain so um but it was an amazing practice exercise to actually get good at explaining your business very very shortly and and having compact materials and yeah they um they wrote us a turn sheet they were the major you know major source of funding in that round and then we uh worked with our lead investors from uh the New York angels to get a really great Syndicate going and we had a bunch of VCS and and Angel groups and uh ended up over subscribing the round twice so I think our original Target was 2 million and then we bumped it up to three and then we topped it off at 3.85 um because we were like that's we're good let's just close it off you know we don't need anything more than this so um yeah that was kind of the Inception and execution of that did you know that most Founders waste days of their lives chasing the wrong investors well as a Founder you know your time is your most valuable resource don't waste it on the investors that aren't going to write you a check here at Thunder we built a free tool that identifies exactly which VCS are worth your time 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VC now let's get back to the show so trying to get to you get for good problem to have did you you bumped the valuation did you keep the terms the same uh good question I think that the valuation was uh the pre didn't change but obviously your post change um and I think we kind of had in our mind some built-in flexibility there and kind of what was what was negotiated so um you know I think the the nature of that deal was that there was so many groups and and some of the groups they're not spvs it's like you have 20 Angel Investors coming in so there's maybe one person kind of responsible for that but you still have to sort of manage the Dynamics of you know if you try to bump your terms there's going to be melt now you're screwing with other things like if there's minimums and timelines for closing so it's a very very careful careful dance and uh I think it was probably atypical than most you know startup fundraising processes where you have like one lead VC and like two following VCS um this was very interesting round yeah sounds like it um and so and this is all from just Angels or did you get any institutional in this round as well so we had um Studio VC gels uh J Ventures and emerging Ventures um so those are the the VCS that participated New York Angels led the round then we had uh Miami Angels uh San Hill angels and a number of other Angel groups so um no no institutionalsales like a institution in the angel world because they kind of operate like a VC and I tried to tell them that they watch this I think you guys should organize like a VC it might be easier deal FL I'm just saying um but yeah uh yeah I'll be honest I think you're you're not the only but I would say one of the first Founders that found the show that had a lot of success with Angel groups often it's a giant Hit or Miss but it sound like you have multiple Paths of connections into it so it wasn't just submitting an application on the website you had intros to the you know key people in the fir you know the group that that open the door so I just like to put that little note in there for Founders to like you know a lot of the subit application like that's not enough you got yeah there's still investors on the other side of the application form someone's looking at these things you know they have to make tough judgment calls like there's no harm in reaching out and pitching that person directly and making sure that you have a warm connection or a network around you and um you know listen imagine if you're the angel reviewing these applications and someone just appears out of thin air you know it's like do you trust them are they submitting valid information you know if you know that they came from a trusted connection that's just you know your your chances are going to go way up but so you get 4 million of the bank kind of peak Market 2021 you know the there's a lot of attention on gaming but you go for you run for a couple years and now you got to raise a series a walk us through the decision of raising a series a where you're at with the business at this point and what that Journey was like in kind of what we saw in 2023 compared to what we saw in 2021 yeah so our seed to series a is goes a little something like this uh as things are progressing and we're seeing great results all of a sudden the market shifts and you know we're always thinking about okay like are we building our business in the way that's you know most primed for success and so if you know that you're building a business that needs Venture Capital you have to be aware of what the Venture markets are looking for and you know obviously everyone wants profitability but some businesses are not really designed to be profitable at first and that's actually the wrong way to build them especially consumer Tech where you know you need to get the scale you need critical mass you need distribution and monetization can affect growth so um so understanding that you know we took a hard look at you know where we were spending money we said okay we probably need more Runway because the market looks a little crummy and we don't want to time this improperly and uh so we cut costs we sort of slimmed the operations down and we killed all paid marketing we were doing a hefty amount of paid marketing we were good at it we were getting great results uh it got more expensive to keep up growth because you know now you're having to um replenish a larger un user base and you're needing to buy you know a larger ad spend to reach a larger amount of people and so we saw a declining efficiency so we just said let's just kill it and let's just kind of sit with that see what happen which is scary I mean it was like working great for us but we were like yeah let's save the money and see what the product does without any of that so it was it was stable but the growth was not like super sexy or exciting and uh and so we kind of got to thinking like all right right well how else do we grow we're the scrappy startup we need to think of you know the next big thing and uh without getting too much in the weeds we basically found our next growth Channel and uh it was through Partnerships and it was really Tech enabled and so it was kind of product driven growth through Partnerships that just skyrocketed our user acquisition all of the metrics that follow user acquisition and uh and it was like okay this is very exciting this is kind of a Eureka moment and uh now is a really good time to you know get to the next stage so that we can scale this strategy up and so I think there's there's fundraising strategies um one of our advisers kind of taught me this um you know you've got like it's just time right you're running out of cash you got to raise money that's one fundraising strategy another is you know you have some sort of like competitive angle that like you know we need to raise money to do this specific thing because this will Shore up our bets or take advantage and strategically position us and then there is the like scale up like we've we you know we have a nice fire going we need to pour gas on the fire and so um so we seemed like we were in a pour gas on the fire situation and that led us to uh raising our our series a um so that was you know there was a seed extension in between that so um don't want anyone to feel like you don't need to do that or you shouldn't do that you know it's not great to do that but um it was not a a Down Round for us it was basically just an Insider round to um Shore up our Runway give us a little bit more room to operate and um and that was actually pretty much almost entirely done by our existing investors we added a few uh a few Outsiders so we did have a second seed sandwich in between um but yeah it was just time to grow and uh I think the kind of dots started to connect and of that seed plus we'll call it uh was that rolled into the series a was it done on a safe or a convertible and uh safe so that was his own own round yeah so we don't we don't count that in the series a it did convert into the series a but we didn't count that towards the amount of got so raised maybe what a couple million in that seed plus and then yeah it was like two 2. 12 in the uh the series a yep um so just you know I'm glad you share that just because everyone thinks it's such a up in the right you know experience and you know you were one of most I feel in uh 2022 2023 that had to kind of go back to investors and say hey markets change dramatically give us a little bit more Capital give us a little more Runway got this figured out um so it's great that you guys were able to do that um so when you go to your your series a all right we're uh pour gas in the fire situation uh how did you run your process for bringing in you know investors to the series a so this time uh we got Salesforce set up so uh I kind of brought home uh you know something I'm very comfortable with which is managing pipelines and Salesforce and so we set up a proper CRM um did the same thing we did in our initial seed round just tried to do do it better at a more professional level um and now that you know Co was sort of waning um got on the road met with more investors face to face went to GDC um kind of really kicked it off in person and um you know I think the general gist is it's never as clean or as straightforward as we want it to be so I think for us you know when we were like we're going to go raise series a um you know we felt pretty confident we had the right metrics to do that and so you know we kind of just went for it and you know we went out there and just lined up the pitches and we know you know you got to get a lead first so you just really focus on investors that can lead you talk to investors that can follow but you know don't really spend your time there and uh you know my experience in sales dictates you know you need a lot of at bats right you're not going to hit them all none of them are going to go out of the park unless you have you know you hit enough balls that day and so we um yeah we we had a pretty robust pipeline it just lined up a lot of meetings back toback I think it was like probably two to four weeks of just you know meetings meetings meetings second third meetings early diligence questions um we had a data room set up going into the round which was something that I think we kind of learned our lesson on in previous rounds is you don't want to be in the middle of fundraising and then also scraping together data room so we actually put the data room together and um yeah I think you know we obviously had our our fair share of of rejections and plenty of uh you know ghosts and lots that got very far and we got some really Advanced conversations with some really exciting institutionalsales round um we actually flew to their office in Columbus for their partner meeting which was uh pretty intense I was like you know literal under a spotlight pitching to you know a u shaped bench of the entire partnership and there was also people on a zoom and um but yeah it went really great they actually printed out and presented us a term sheet on the spot and they were also the only investors to tell us that uh our data room was one of their favorites that they've ever seen which is you know as a Founder if you've ever built a data room that's nice to hear there a lot of work kind of a dry deliverable your users aren't touching this no one's getting excited about your data room um but they were like that was one of the things that really encourag them to take a closer look and spend some serious time with us and uh that was nice because we did put a lot of work into wow now I have to ask what made your data room special uh I don't really know I think we just I I think we have a tend we just overdue everything that we do like I just I kind of to a fault I'm a perfectionist so I mean even like our user traction slides are like it's a beautiful deck so it's like we got something like beautiful decks lots of supplemental data um just like an overabundance of of the things that we know investors are going to want organized in the places they expect it to be and I think we just went probably two levels Beyond where we actually needed to go and you know part of that was we're very confident in that helping us um and and we just wanted people that some of the challenge we've had in fundraising is that you know just getting an investor to spend enough time with you to look close enough at what you're doing to get properly excited about it is part of the process and and you might have an investor that would have invested if they decided to spend four hours with you in due diligence but if they didn't decide to do that like they're passing you're not going to get them to invest so um we were lucky for them to get that far want to spend that time and I think that just kind of brought them even further over the top so just for fun what uh what platform did you use to distribute your data r uh I don't even know it open source thing our CTO set it up um we we tried a bunch of different data rooms we had problems with all of them different features missing this one's too expensive this one's too annoying this one's not user friendly so um yeah Gavin has a tendency to just be like there's probably an open source solution for this and we could probably just spin it up and it'll probably be cheaper to pay for another you know ec2 and so that's what we did uh and it's actually pretty nice it's very flexible it's like super pro branded it's like white labeled um so that might added to the experience was I think it was a very good ux for someone consuming from the data room and um yeah so that I I wish I remember the name of it but uh like most things we do at allar we're like we should just do this ourselves fair enough yeah yeah it sounds like you weren't using drop box uh so that's why I want to ask drop box good choice um well appreciate you sharing that and that journey and you know with getting that series you're at that feel on the fire what what was ultimately the metric that you brought to the table that got investors excited was the user growth was Revenue what was ultimately what you know kind of ramped up because in gaming and one thing we haven't talked about is your business model but yeah uh you know kind what was it that one over investors other than your mical data R yeah so there I mean there's a few I don't think there was just one I think there was uh generally the just user growth rate and just how quickly we were scaling up the users that we were making content for how much content we were making how much engagement that was driving then the other side of it is really the bottom funnel traction so like the users that really engage with our creator tools we're extremely engag uh the growth of our monetization the traction metrics of monetization the benchmarks of our monetized users against you know industry leaders right like that's I think one of the things that um some of the best advice I've ever gotten at fundraising you know if you want to explain things to an investor give them a anchor like a frame of reference so you know if you're trying to explain how good your conver conion rate is on your daily active users and to monetize users why don't you show them what that conversion rate is for a company that is definitively as successful as that investor wants you to be so we had some anchor metrics some comparative metrics against you know things like a roblocks or some of the gains that we support where it's like okay this is what their conversion rate looks like this is ours or this is what their you know annual uh customer value is this is what ours uh looks like so I think those those kind of comparisons those benchmarks where we're you know uh besting or you know kind of equally some of those kind of industry Titans is um is is one aspect to it and um yeah I think there's you know not one single metric I think it was the story was there's a really exciting thing going on here with this you know user acquisition story and model and um you know and the underlying results of that are also really promising we also had a a mobile app uh beta launch and um you know and still to this day I'm like I don't have as much they have much more benchmarks than I do as VCS right this is all they do all day long is look at different apps and they were just saying some of the engagement metrics in our mobile app were like unheard of and I was like that's awesome I didn't we were like we didn't know that we're like you know they're like they triple checked like is it really like this many you know screens people are looking at per day and we're like yeah like it's you know and it's going up um so that so things like that as well we're like okay you know this trend gets very exciting uh given enough time time Horizon appreciate that and you know kind of the the last question you before we kind of start to wrap up here you know I always like to ask why 12 million like why why the number that you rais why 12 million um well that's a very complicated answer I think it starts with in my opinion there should always be a range if a Founder is not flexible enough to be able to operate their business at a plus or minus certain amount of money um that's probably not going to bode very well like you need there needs to be some flexibility baked in you're in full control over how you build the business so um there was a range I think the uh lessons that I've learned and from all the founders I've talked to if you can take more money you should take it so you know if you can take more money really comes down to like your valuation your tolerance for dilution how that affects the future of your cap table and uh then it also just boils out to like is the money actually there is it attached to any terms that you can't live with so I think it was a combination of those factors where um you know we probably could have gone a little more than that we probably could have survived with a little less than that but we really like the plan we had for that much and uh and the way that things were coming together between the new investor the existing investors um that's basically where we landed it was not you know necessarily where we started in the process but it was within that range so it's a variety of factors I hope that's not too much of a non-answer um without getting into too much specifics but it's kind of how I think about that no I think it's a good good reflection uh so at this point we we've covered some good material you kind of share with some D and do Nots and some of your personal experience uh you know before we we wrap up here what what's some parting advice for Founders that you know might be out in the market or coming to the market soon to raise raise around yeah I think don't listen to anybody that tells you not to do what you're doing um yeah I think in general like a lot of people like don't do this don't do that you know you're not going to be successful and I think the most valuable lesson I've learned in um this which was you know a nugget of wisdom from another adviser also keep good advisers um is um the only thing that can stop you is you and so there's going to be multiple points in the Journey of building a company where you're GNA want to give up that it's like physics it's like gravity that's just how it goes but if you don't stop yourself nothing else is going to stop you right and that's not like immutable like there's certain points where you know yeah it's like you throw in the towel and that's generally it's like you're out of ideas and just nothing's working and you're out of cash too right like that there is a point where there's a stopping point but um that stopping point I think you know from from what I understand we haven't reached one of those um is you know that's quite obvious everything else is just like it's going to suck you're going to feel like you're getting punched in the face every day there's a lot of a lot of struggles there's a lot of pressure there's a lot of problems and and that's what we do right we solve problems we deal with pressure and we keep going and it gets a little easier right and then it gets harder again then it gets a little easier then it gets harder again and there's a great chart in um Scott belsky's book the messy middle and it just charts the entrepreneur Journey uh and it's like you know things are amazing things are amazing it's like I can't do this oh God why did I start doing this actually maybe I can do this things are getting better wow things are really good oh no they're bad again and it kind of looks like a jagged saw that climbs up into the right and that's exactly what the journey is and is going to feel like and I think the more that you brace for that and internalize that um you know the more prepared you'll be and the better your chances of success not really agree uh Nick I really appreciate you being on the show what's the best way for for people to to follow you or reach out to you and and know what you're doing in All-Star yeah totally um I mean feel free to shoot me a note it's just Nick allstar.edu LinkedIn find me on LinkedIn um just search for Nick Cuomo or all star. uh I'm not very active on on Twitter uh I do have a website I think it's uh nick.com I want to say and that should lead you to all my other socials uh and uh yeah shoot me a note always happy to chat I love meeting with other Founders and if I can give advice or make intros or something like that schedule permitting I'm I'm always glad to do it awesome well Nick thank you so much for sharing your insights it was great having you on the show and I look forward to getting this out to our audience totally thanks so much Jason it was great to be here thanks for listening to the show today we hope you learned something valuable and 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