How do you reposition a services business for VC funding?

welcome to episode 25 of fundraising demystified we are back after an extended holiday break and I'm excited to introduce our first guest of 2024 Ali Ansari CEO and founder of micro one. a platform to hire and preet software Engineers that has recently raised a rolling preed of $3.3 million from dream Ventures and Jason calacanis with his most recent valuation being at $30 million shares his story of how important it was to connect with other Founders from peer groups to help him get warm introductions to the investors that got him his first few checks why he did a rolling preed raise and how he focused on building a relationship with Founders instead of just pitching them and how he was able to reposition his agency to be a tech company to attract outside funding there's a lot in this episode to learn and as a reminder to get notified of our weekly podcast and and newsletters be sure to subscribe at join. thunder. VC again that's join. thunder. VC well let's go ahead and get started with the show hey everyone welcome back you got Jason Kirby here founder and managing director of thunder. BC welcoming Ali Ansari to the show today founder and CEO of micro one welcome to the show Alie thank you Jason thanks for having me uh I'm really excited to have you on today I think you have a really unique story that I think will resonate with a lot of Founders in the terms of what you did for micro one from kind of repositioning you guys as a tech company to make sure you closed your your Capital round but before I ramble on about that why don't you tell the audience a little bit about you and macro one yeah absolutely I studied computer science at at Berkeley started a a Dev agency when I was a freshman there and as I was building the dev agency I quickly realized that there's a need for building inhouse engineering teams for companies versus working with them as sort of a agency Project based engagement and so I I experimented with that model on the side which is helping companies hire and manage preved software Engineers that and that experience was called micro one really quickly I realized that that model is is much more scalable um and and frankly micro one out grew the agency very quickly so I decided to kind of merge the two together focus on the core offering of micro one which is to help companies build worldclass in-house engineering teams and then my uh third year at Berkeley I I was I was studying math and computer science but I decided to drop math so I can graduate one year early and focus fully on micro one and then shortly after graduation um we we ended up raising a preed round of funding which was led by jcal and uh dream ventes no that's awesome and you know the fact you have you know the infamous jcal on the C I'm huge fan of the almod so let's talk about this a little bit so when I first heard of you guys the first thing that comes to mind is staffing agency and that's you know first thing that comes to VC Minds as non you know non-venture back how did you go about convincing you know people like Jason kenis and dream Ventures to to believe in you and to believe that you're much more than just another staffing agency yeah so there's a couple of things there and and that was actually one of the things that we were struggling with in the early days of of trying to raise people would just look at us as Staffing HC and and you know we didn't have the right narrative built around why we're very different basically the the difference is that we're we're productizing a staffing agency essentially you could think of it as a Marketplace of vetted Engineers where companies can really quickly hire world-class Talent the first part is you know that that that sort of mechanism to productize it which is you can essentially go through a very easy process tell us requirements see profiles request interview and then you know hire that that engineer and then manage that engagement on the dashboard as well so manage basically means you know it's not the devop side of things it's more like Global HR management where you can give a raise give a bonus track hours and you know all those things uh but the second part which is super important is is we built out a tool called GPT vetting which is basically a a pre-screening tool for screening technical Talent at scale so that's really what made the difference is you know we we we we were conveying to investors that our our secet sauce in the long run is going to be we're going to get thousands of applications each month of great engineering profiles and we're going to Screen through them at a large scale very quickly using gbt betting and and so when we build out that tool the the the vision for product izing a quotequote staffing agency became very clear to investors and the sort of perception changed around it no and that's that's a good way to think about it in terms of productizing Staffing because I think no one argues with the fact that Staffing could be very profitable it's just you know typically linear scale and there's you know lower margins but you know Staffing you know it's big budgets uh in most cases at what stage was the business in terms of clients and revenue when you were able to kind of get that first term sheet from Jason calanis yeah so actually the first term sheet wasn't from jkl we had a bit of a sort of odd way to raise of precede which is you know I call it like a rolling preed basically so the way the way that we did it is we had Joshua Browder and Corey Levy as the first two investors they each put in 110k and then after that we we grew for a couple of months and then we went out to actually raise a full a full precede and actually the the initial post money valuation we started at was a a $7 million cap and we got uh a bunch of angels to join at that that seven cap we actually also got the the whole micro one team to to put in small tracks as well um and then after that seven cap we we then grew again for for about a month or two and then we raised the cap again to to 14 and that's when jkl came in and sort of Le LED that and then at the 14 we got a few hundred thousand more from from other investors jcal of course being the the majority investor we wrapped out up in uh I believe in June the terms were set a couple of months back you know JC took took took a couple months for due diligence and then um few months after that in in October actually very recently we got another 1.3 million check uh from dream Ventures we actually had wrapped up the round we did you know $2 million preced wrapped it up we wasn't expecting any more any more checks we got some interest from VC's but we just you know respectfully declining but dream Ventures made us a good offer in terms of value ads as well as valuation they they upped the cap from 14 million to 30 million and the the 30 million we we had basically we almost had doubled in size in terms of Revenue since the terms were set for when Jake Al set the terms at 14 million uh it wasn't exactly double it was close to double so the valuation was a little bit more than double so it was a bit of a premium but it wasn't just an arbitrary increase from 1430 um but yeah that they they put in 1.3 million at 30 so so we had basically an over subscribe round and and it came out to a total of 3.3 million and you know all of it wasn't at the 30 million or at the 14 million it was a rolling prec thr I I really want to talk about this a little bit more in what you call the the rolling safe which is I would say more normal than most Founders like to admit and as much as Everyone likes to think that they can just go out and get all the money they need and one Fell Swoop at a preed stage it's actually less likely to happen uh and so I guess kind of walk us through the timeline so you brought in those first couple Angels you mentioned cor ly and another at what point did they jump on board was there already Revenue was there already traction at this point when you got those first angel checks uh so there was a bit of Revenue very small almost nothing and I actually still had uh the agency so I was kind of working on two things and um Josh I had I had a call with Josh we had like a 15-minute call and then like right after the call I sent me an offer of course we did some due diligence and then he he invested right away and at that point we didn't have any product or anything like it was like super Scrappy like bunch of like type forms basically um but we did have a little bit of Revenue and then once we once we wrapped those up a couple of months after that where we where I stopped working on the agency I just had micro on as the only company I was focused on we had a product to show as well as more Revenue that's when we went went out and and raised the you know started raising the the preed how'd you get in front of Joshua uh and those investers so my friend Mark from hypercard shout out to hypercard he uh introduced me to Corey and Cory Ron zells I'm I'm pretty sure you're probably aware of Corey Zell is incredible Community by the way of amazing Founders I was in Zell's cohort and then it's it's a weak basically accelerator where you meet a bunch of cool Founders and meet Corey and some mentors after that Corey introduced me to Josh which is a a mentor at adfs and founder of do not pay and and then I had a call with Josh for 15 minutes and that's that's one and Cory and Jos actually decided to invest together no that's awesome and that's something I just want to highlight for other Founders in terms of like the best introduction you can get to you know investors are from other qualified vetted Founders and it seems like you followed that path uh to the te there and you moving on to getting introduced to the next round of investors so Jason K and the others said like ultimately what led how did you get in front of them and what led them to investing and were you working directly with Jason or more so his team before Jason Joshua and Corey introduced me to a bunch of investors we you know I met uh Ryan I met Andrew Kim from you know people from General catalst and many many VCS and got a lot of Direction and and of course some said yes most of them were were Angels putting in like 50 to 100K checks and then after so we closed we raised close to a million with just those Angel checks through introductions from from Josh con Cory after that is is when I met uh when I met jcal through through an introduction I first worked with his team um Andre on his team we that he was my main PC the whole team at launch by the way is is super great and and easy to work with they do have a very long due diligence process which which I respect but but they're very easy to work with um and then the the final meeting was was with jel and frankly I I didn't think the meeting went too well with jel I was like okay like I I don't think they're going to invest but I got an offer the week after and and they wanted to invest at a at a nice valuation so so we took that no that's awesome it's good to hear and I guess what were some of the experiences you had in terms of the nose that you got like you know in terms of all the investors that you pitched H you obviously got a couple yeses you know sced the round and you're out the races but you know what was the was it like dealing with the nose and how many nose were you dealing with uh a good amount of nose I mean um I probably met at least 60 70 investors probably more um but somewhere around there um and you know a portion of them say yes but the the nose were each time were sort of like General reason really no no feedback sometimes sometimes the feedback would be around the sort of Staffing agenc thing that we talked about that became much less when we when we introduced GPT betting I think think one thing I would have done earlier on to perhaps close a little bit faster is I would have spent more time on the pitch but more so the story around the pitch and like the narrative I want to build for for why I'm working on this and what what the you know what the 10 billion doll hundred billion dollar vision is I didn't have enough of that and I realized after that of course showing what you're building now like the current state of the product is is important but really showing the what you what you believe the the product will be in five years is also extremely important you have to get investor to get very excited for for A10 billion hundred billion possible outcome versus you know what what is the current state so the the initial iteration on my pitch was very much what the product is now and and when I you know when I showed Josh the pitch he was like you know scrap this like show what the product is going to be in three years and like talk about the company as if you already there uh so basically conveying the vision in in much more detail throughout the pitch and so I iterated many many times throughout the raise like I probably changed the pitch maybe like 15 15 times um but what I would have done obviously the iteration is good but I think if I spent more time in the beginning just really building a nice story that would have saved some iterations and probably close around a little bit faster but would you be able to have written that Perfect story without going through all the nose and you know the feedback and you feedback loops that you had prior that that that's a good point and yeah you're right Pro probably not I think it's just part of the game to to go through these many feedback loops so that it in retrospect it feels like oh maybe I should have just done this in the beginning but you probably just couldn't do it in the beginning that's a good point but but I do think one thing is like Builders or Founders that really are product driven they kind of hate stuff like pitch decks and spreadsheets and they just want to build and and I I was sort of in the same same mindset and I was like every time I was spending a minute on the pitch I was like oh my God like I shouldn't be doing this and and I think like changing my perception on that a little bit would have helped I would have just spent a little bit more time in the beginning versus thinking like oh my God like let's not do a pitch tech let's just go back to building I think like spend a few hours on the pitch Shake it's important yeah it's a valid struggle that I think a lot of Founders deal with is just do I really want to keep doing this dog and pony show why don't people just get it and like let me just build give me the money so I can just build yeah you know it's that you can't kind of have one without the other or you know chicken and egg kind of kind of problem but it looks like you were able to to overcome it um so I guess tell us a little bit about where the business is now and and how you leverage the capital you know why did you raise as much as you did and and what have you guys done with it to date yeah so so we actually built publicly so I'll say the numbers here we're doing a little bit over 400,000 a month in Revenue right now gross margins are around 40% little a little bit above 40% that revenue is a combination of our core offering of course which is micro talents where we help companies hire preved software Engineers the second part of the revenue is microlab which is basically the agency side of our business um and then the third part which is a very small part of Revenue right now is is SAS which is gbt vetting so gbt vetting is just quick context on GB Bing we we use it internally for our recruitment team of course that was the purpose of building it but we got a lot of interest from clients wanting to use it so we decided to actually uh you know publish it as as a as a SAS tool for our clients as well and so yeah that that's where the business is at right now we're we're we're 25 people where the business will be let's say you know three years from now I think um is the the the portion of Revenue which is SAS is going to be much much larger I think the the the path to you know let's say 100 million a year is is becoming clear and and and that path seems to be through GPT betting and and through GPT betting being used as a SAS product and of course within our micro one Talent offering as well it's sort of a subset of that but really the large scale is going to come from companies subscribing you know for $500 a month thousand a month based on the number of reports per month to gbd betting itself so I think that's that's where we're going we're talking to a couple of really large Enterprise companies right now that that are interested in using it and um so I think that's where the focus is going to be that that's certainly where the product focus is our our product team is is the biggest team at micro one and basically like 95% of the product eff first right out are on GPT betting which of which helps of course our main offering micro one talent but also improves the product for our clients that use it as a SAS product and you know you're public about your numbers which you know is awesome I guess kind of tell me about you know what does it mean to be building in public and what's kind of been the pros and cons of that for you the the first thing that we did this was about eight months ago is we made all of our numbers super transparent internally so you know literally every single data point that I see every single team member sees and that includes like pnls like how much you know profit we made what the gross margs are every single data point the team sees and when I was doing that I I asked a couple of my uh you know like sort of mentors and founder friends that are more experienced than I am and and almost all of them said like no like don't don't do that like it's too much transparency it's it's not going to it's not going to end up well and and I I think in retrospect that was one one of the best decisions I've made so far and it just the sort of culture of the team has has been improved significantly because of it you know people work extremely hard and then they see the outcome of their work each month when we grow with that I was thinking about okay like maybe I could kind of apply the same sort of philosophy to just everyone on Twitter like why not I was going back and forth for a couple of months and I decided that the the pros are certainly in out way that the cons there wasn't much cons the sort of the only con that kept coming to is like oh our competitors is going to see our numbers and and and really like I I came to the conclusion that sure they're going to see we're growing like what what are they going to do with that I mean you you can't maybe they'll see our gross margins try to like improve theirs or something but they're they're gonna they're going to do that anyways so that that was sort of the main con that I was thinking about I was like you know what like it it doesn't matter let's just build in public so about about a month and a half ago I tweeted out a revenue chart um that was a first tweet of you know building public prior to that we were doing like product updates and stuff on Twitter but in terms of the numbers itself month and a half ago and we just off that one tweet we got like 20 leads and I was like all right this is we're 100% G to go in like all in with this and two of like two out of those 20 of leads so far have already converted they're the great clients of ours one of them is is far boed he's building something really great and he's a client of microlab and micro one Talent now and so I think it gets it gets us leads it gets us customers gets us organic demand it goes very well with the Twitter marketing that we're doing in terms of like actual paid Twitter marketing we spent about 30k a month on Twitter ads and my organic Twitter goes very well hand inand with that um and then the third thing is it builds a lot of trust and Authority even before we have sales calls so our sales team has has an easier time talking to clients because clients look at us as like you know a company that that they they know the CEO of already on Twitter and they kind of respect us a little bit more and just increases conversions overall so yeah we're going we're going to definitely keep keep going with this building in public no that's impressive and I think that's exactly a wellth thought through reason to build in public I feel when it drives the bottom line business like the core of the business I see a lot of reasons to do and it's also culture like a lot of Founders don't want to do what you want to do because it can create sticky situations internally in terms of you know people internally knowing all the numbers or you know competitors or whatnot but it looks like you kind of weighed your pros and cons and you made a decision that works for you and it's driving substantial amount of business but also kind of want impact that you're spending you know 30 grand on Twitter ads uh at this stage you know considering you guys you know you say precede uh but you're at a $400,000 mrr at this point now is it Mr or monthly Revenue so yeah it's not all of it is not Mr a good portion of it more than 70% of it approximately more than 70 70% of it is Mr but microolap portion of it is not recurring so so that's total revenue and then yeah most of it is ISR and just for clarity purposes when you say 400k is that gmv in a way of like you know salaries plus your margin or is it your margin only yeah so the way I look at it is you call you can call it JM you call it gross revenue you call it Revenue I just look at it as total Topline revenue and then what is the margins on that Revenue so it's 400k a little bit more than 400k a month is Topline gross revenue and the gross margin is considering a weighted average of all services is approximately 40% so you know that that that's in combination of microlab having you know 60 70 plus per gross margins Talent having 25 to 30 and then of course SAS having more than 90 the weighted average of all that is is uh is the gross margins that we have now did you know that most Founders waste days of their lives chasing the wrong investors 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 to pursue we score your company against 3500 VCS and family offices that have been vetted and are actively writing checks into companies like yours get your AI recommended list of investors that will look like this absolutely free by creating a free profile at thunder. 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VC now let's get back to the Show Gotcha so and something I always like to clarify for Founders is when they kind of share Top by numbers and they're like oh like you know we have a client doing a million dollars a month but in GMB you know and that's they take it 10% so technically their net margin is only the the 100K and so investors will quickly look in terms of benchmarking you against other companies but you know still 160 wherever that might be you know 150 to 200k is still fantastic numbers assuming it's continuing to grow you know those are phenomenal numbers to be working from uh at your stage so it's still something to be impressed by but a lot of people try to like mask it oh we're doing 400k but it's actually like substantially lower you know in more of like when you look at the actual operating revenues that you get to work from That's a g multiple different businesses in that sense Revenant lines it makes sense to have to Blended yeah and also the the way you like if we were let's say up for cor we had like a 10% take rate certainly call gmv and and probably we'll talk about the net revenue actually the the as the key metric but but we're not that I mean our our take rate is much much higher than 10% and if you take the the the weighted average of all the margins it's actually around 40% so that's why calling it girl Revenue I think is is uh is a little more accurate but but really like the way I look at it is sort of arbitrary what you call it you just you should look at the revenue and what the gross margins are and that that's where you can determine the health of the company yeah that makes sense sense and when it comes to maintaining your relationship with your investors so you've you know doubled and then doubled again essentially in less than a year timeline correct from when you did the $7 million cap to when you did the 14 and now you did a 30 um so I imagine your investors especially the7 million cap investors are very happy what's kind of been your process of keeping them engaged and informing them of their progress and the fact that you went out and raised additional Capital when you originally said you were done yeah so we do monthly updates for overall company updates where where we include you know the revenue with Mr gross margins like all the data that we have basically and then in that update we also have uh two other categories which is product and and talent so in product we talk about you know what what we've developed and what what's coming to be developed in the next Sprint and then a talent we talk about the core team you know if we added anyone new and and sort of we we we talk about like culture and a few quotes from the team and so forth so that monthly update I've been doing it since we got our first check uh every single month actually we skipped one month we had a we had a down month and I was like you know what let me let me just wait until next month in retrospect like if you know if we have more down months we're just going to send an update anyways but that that was where month where I was like okay I know for a fact we're gonna jump back from this like very well next month so let me just skip this month's update and and do one next month but other than that we've been doing monthly updates every single month and then we also do a product update each month where it's it's separate than the monthly updates it's it's just about the product and and everything that we've launched and actually we're we're going live uh tomorrow with an update with some cool stuff added to to gbt betting and and so there's going to be a product update to investors customers and and uh team members probably on Monday we we debug a little bit over the weekend and then send the product update on Monday awesome and I guess what happened when you skip that month did anyone say anything no not at all I I think PE people appreciate the fact that we're very diligent with the updates you know especially at our stage which is earlier you know pretty early stage and the updates are like quite long there's Graphics a lot of lot of charts and so forth so every time we send an update we we get you know a lot of investors saying like hey like great update which which which I always appreciate like I I think I think more investors should reply actually to updates like I always love reading what what they think even if it's like hey like nice job very few do actually which is kind of odd but when we didn't send the update we we didn't get anyone like asking for it so yeah that was nice so that's a for all the investors listening make sure to listen you respond to your Founders uh it's you know when you put it out and it just kind of goes into what appears to be a black box I totally you know totally feel the pay you know especially if there's an ask in there and no one responds at all that yeah the last the last uh investor update the ask was to follow me on Twitter because because we're doing a building in public and I only got like six followers I was like I expected more than that like six new followers but but hey I I appreciate those six yeah you're GNA you're going to follow up with each of them one by one like I saw I looked at my analytics you didn't c yeah yeah I and then you got to get them to to repost it retweet it uh reexit I guess what what do you I don't know call retweet yeah I still call it retweet I love you long but but retweeted it sounds like ex it's like I don't know what to call it anymore just repost like you do on LinkedIn um yeah so I think those some valuable insights I think for a lot of Founders to to think about when they're engaging their investors and yeah I think it's interesting you chose not to you know share the update in the down month um but I think it sounds like you've learned you know moving forward you'll post both the good and the bad I think that's something a lot of Founders make the mistake of is they don't come out with the bad they only project good and then when things start going bad I just actually met with a Founder I invested in personally not too long ago you know things went South business didn't go in the direction it's supposed to that's what happens in this game but um he didn't he was so diligent about monthly updates and then just went silent like no communication you're like something's wrong but I don't know what what is wrong and I don't know how I can help if I don't know what's going on so I think it's important to always kind of keep those updates going and flowing even when they're negative uh in the sense that it's a chance to leverage that and ask for help uh when it can yeah 100% you know kind of going back to the to the race so you you've been really ramping up and you know things have been growing uh so you know you've had a good momentum for you which is what a lot of ECS want to see that's why they make a lot of bets they want to bet on the things that have momentum I guess what's your advice to Founders to build that momentum uh when you're raising Capital yeah I I think I think if you if you don't want to do a rolling precede and you want to just quickly wrap up the round momentum is going to be incredibly important and you know the way we the way that we did it we kind of it was less important just because we we had time and we we weren't trying to rush it in like a month or or two months and and wrap up the whole round and we were iteratively increasing the valuation so I think first thing I'll say here is like I highly recommend looking into doing a rolling preed because the average valuation of your total round is going to be higher especially if you're trying to raise like super early on why not like keep building and and like keep getting more revenue and just increasing valuation every month or two of course you're probably going to spend more time raising in terms of like total hour spent as well as total duration of timeline of the raise so I I would first off I would say consider that but if you're if you're going to do a momentum raise and wrap it up in in month or two which I think every round after precede should should be that way but for that I would say make sure to have a few really good relationships already when you announce the raise you can already get a couple of checks and and really sort of start building fomo I think you know a lot of it is just like human psychology you have to build fomo within the investor Community you know OB obviously you know you can't you got to build fomo in a in an organic way because investors can can often tell when you're trying to like Rush timelines and that becom comes a a negative like if you say oh by the way we're wrapping up next week but like in reality you're not wrapping up next week like they're not going to invest if if you say stuff like that and frankly I I did that a couple times and it it didn't work out so build organic momentum have a few really good relationships that that you know very likely they're going to invest right away and yeah so those are the things that come to mind yeah let's un back that a little bit more like what are some other things that you kind of learned in your Capital raise experience that you felt you didn't do properly or could have done better I think think one thing would be present the product right away in your pitch maybe a quick problem and solution statement and then just showcase the product one thing I did later on that that really helped is I added a one minute loom video of me just quickly demoing the product and so people that would look at the the deck offline they if if they just take a minute to look at that loom video which which most people actually did they would have a a much better understanding of what we do very quickly so I I highly highly recommend that another thing is and by the way like when I met with jcel like he he basically we skipped introductions like we didn't really do any of that he just said like show me what you're building we just jumped into the product itself of course not all investors are like that you have to kind of gauge the the type of conversation that investor wants to have and that that's actually another point of advice I would say is sometimes I I I tried two different methods of uh conversation with investors one was running through the pitch deck and then doing questions and answers you know after the pitch the other method was just having a conversation and I realized instead of like having conviction on one of those things and trying to do that one thing for all investor meetings just like gauge the either ask them straight up ask them which one do you prefer like should I run through a pitch and then you ask questions or should we just have a conversation or try to gauge it in in a more natural way so once I started doing that at the end um I realized it's sort of a 50-50 split some calls I was doing a just conversation there was no pitch like pulled up I was share my screen sometimes and and show a couple of slides or a couple of things on the product but it was more more so a conversation um but but some some were more structured where they wanted to hear the pitch first like for six seven minutes and then they wanted to to ask questions so like one thing that I kept trying to really heavily optimize for is like H how can I give this investor as much information as possible in 30 minutes and I realized maybe that's not the best thing to actually optimize for uh later on what I started to optimize for is like building more of like an emotional connection by toning down on my story a little bit more and like spending more time on that in the beginning plus simply getting them to understand the product like those two things what I started optimiz St versus like giving them as much information as possible that's another thing I would say well I I think that's a brilliant Revelation for a lot of Founders to understand is they feel they have to just get everything out like we're doing all this amazing stuff you have to know about all of it and it's like what you're really fighting for is another meeting like that first 30 minutes is not to get a million dollar check because that's very unlikely that that will happen um but the likeliness of getting another meeting that's a you know a little bit easier an Ask easier bit of a lift and getting them just get their appetite wet and which is do I like you and do I know what you're doing and do I believe in what you're doing those are the real questions you have to get answered in that first meeting and it sounds like you kind of course corrected to get to that point yeah exactly and and actually in the beginning I wouldn't even talk about my personal story I was like oh like I let's just jump jump into to explain the company right away and when I started talking about my personal story for a few minutes and it's like two three minutes of like you know I was born in Iran you know didn't wasn't really getting along with teachers in elementary middle school Etc and like I talked a little about the previous companies that I had and H how I got a small acquisition on one of them and so forth and how that transitioned into building micro one that I think that part is what really got the second meetings with most investors versus the company itself and I was completely neglecting that I was like in the beginning I was like okay maybe maybe they don't like they don't want to hear this they just want to see if the the company's doing well like what the company is what the vision is but but really it's it's the personal story that matters a lot so I would spend a lot more time on that it sounds sort of cliche like maybe it sounds obvious but I just I wasn't doing this in the beginning no I think it's very important to be able to share that personal story and you know be able to kind of have a conversation and you know show that one you're a human and two that you know that's something that you know they want to build a relationship with you because at the end of the day especially preedee you're going to be in this relationship for 10 years it's and it's a total Gamble and maybe this company isn't the one that works maybe it's the next one but because they backed you now you might they might get a swing at the next one that could be bigger so VC's really like the idea of you know betting early on the right person and if you don't really get that you know identity across it's hard to build that Rapport going back to what you said earlier in terms of the different pitch Styles so go into a meeting with a pitch deck H versus a conversation of the investors that invested what which ones preferred which honestly I I I I don't remember exactly which one's preferred which but but I think it was probably approximately a half split I think the best way to do it is is to Simply ask them in the beginning do you prefer a pitch or do you prefer a conversation because it's hard to gauge like you can't really I mean you can guess but but it's just it's better to just ask so I started doing that and it it really simplified it because because a lot of times they they do have a pretty strong preference for one or the other sometimes they don't but most of the time they do so just ask them in the start and other funds got involved you know you kind of mention with launch you were talking to one of his associates first and then got brought into to Jason you what was that experience like were you talking mostly to analysts and Associates first and then moving up your your way up to change you start directly with Partners what was your experience in terms of like who you had that first meeting with and what was the experience thereafter yeah so I met Andre first I think he's uh an associate I'm not sure um met him for about 30 minutes I believe I I went through a sort of a typical pitch with Andre he's he's more of a you know structure and and wants to hear the pitch and ask questions so so we did that and then I met Heidi on the launch Team um I believe she's a partner and I think for her I I believe it was a conversation and then for Jason it was actually quite different than sort of all of them he just uh you know quickly said hi like five seconds and said show me what you're building so I didn't I didn't even go through a pitch or anything I literally just logged into the dashboard and showed them what we're building I went through the flow of what a customer would would go through and then that and then we had a and then we had a conversation afterwards about the product mainly but we also talked about his his visit I believe to to Japan and a few other things um and he made it about himself yeah he said do you have any questions and I knew a lot about launch so I don't have any launch questions I was like hey how how's Japan yeah so we talked a little bit about that as well smart move very smart move yeah you got excited to answer that actually yeah exactly with smiles perfect uh yeah definitely if you could do anything to kind of toot their horn and you know to their ego it's a it's a smart move because they walk away smiling after the meeting not so much thinking about analyzing your business they're more likey uh so g l smart I really enjoyed this this conversation in terms of the the experience that you shared it's great to kind of talk to you especially when you're sharing in public and you know openly uh building in public you know at this point what are some final advice that you would give to a Founder that is going out for their preed in this market I think two things one is if you if you know any Founders that have raised ask for their help like ask them for specific intros maybe hop on a call with them you know tell them about the company a little bit if they don't know much about it and then and then ask them if they can make intros and you know be be sort of direct with it Founders for the most part are very happy to help and and honestly it's it's kind of an honor when someone asks for help yeah I I like helping other Founders and um so I think most found Founders feel this way so so feel like feel free to ask other Founders for especially if you're in like communities that like like zows or something where where there's a lot of Founders that have raised just DM people and say hey I'm about to raise like can I can I hop on a phone call with you for 10 minutes tell you about our product maybe get some advice about the raise and then once you talk to them at the end of the phone call you can say hey by the way if there's any intros and and yeah so so i' I've had like three four people from zells reaching out to me basically what what I just explained you know having a 10-minute full call with them and then making a bunch of intros for them so like imagine if you do this for if you do this for like three four Founders you're going to get many intros and then and then intros are like sort of a binary tree of like many more intros that come from intros especially the ones that that do invest so so look at that look at it that way I think outbound for VC's frankly doesn't work I I did a little bit of that and I I I got a couple of calls but um actually one of the one of our investors was was through me you know emailing them on or dming them on Twitter but but I think it the the E the effort to reward ratio is like not that good for outbound VCS and some people like the extreme end of this is that is that maybe you'll burn some bridges that way actually I don't think that's necessarily true but some of our investors are saying don't do that because you'll bring some bridges so yeah try try to get intros and and where you should start is of course like I said Founders but more importantly if you can if you can get one or two people to invest and be sort be sort of your early supporters like like the Corey and Josh is of the world and give them a discount on the valuation maybe give them you know a lower cap and and have them kind of help few Rays that'll be super important as well that's a valuable advice and I appreciate you sharing that but I think you also mentioned that there might be uh you know some kind of offer that you could present for micro one to to those listening today do you want to share a little bit about that yeah absolutely so um we we have an offer 240 hours of free software development for any founder listening to this podcast we'll create a page and we'll maybe link it somewhere um but uh basically the way that'll work is you'll get two weeks two weeks free per engineer for up to three engineers and you know the first week you'll be able to completely try them for free and and if if the engagement works out after the third month you'll get another week free so that that's for our main you know micro one Talent offering so if you're hiring Engineers feel free to use that and for GPT vetting if you want to use a tool to to vet some technical Talent we'll extend the free trial from one week to uh two weeks for anyone listening here awesome now it's very gracious to have you and uh make sure to keep the the link in the show notes uh once it goes live and uh if anyone has any good questions they can always reach out to us at help thunder. BC if we need to pass it along to you guys um and I guess who would be the the best type of founder to take advantage of such an offer it's really any founder that is building in-house engineering team so if you already have a couple of Engineers and you're you're looking to expand your engineering team then that that's perfect if you're looking to you know hire a founding engineer your CTO you can also use it so it's really a wide range of companies that that are technical you know tech companies and and already either have engineering teams or are about to build their engine your te Perfect all right well I appreciate you being on the show Ali it's been incredible having you on today and I look forward to to Founders and BC is good to hear your story thanks for listening to the show today we hope you learned something valuable and if you did be sure to let us know in the comments or by hitting that like button and if you're a Founder looking to raise Capital then join us at thunder. VC we provide a free tool to help you identify which VC family offices or lenders are the best fit for you using raai it will save you a ton of time from chasing the wrong investors and since launching our free tools Founders that have joined our Network have gone on to raise over $1 billion in financing again you can find these free tools at thunder. VC and as a reminder we release new episodes every week so stay informed by subscribing to our newsletter at join. thunder. BC again that's join. thunder. BC and if you or someone you know has recently raised around and want to share your story please email me at Jason thunder. VC and that's our show we hope you enjoyed it and we see you next week