How do you turn a blank check into a $6M pre-revenue raise?

Jason Kirby (00:01.822) Welcome to episode 22 of Fundraising Demystified, the show where we uncover the untold stories of founders who have raised capital to bring their visions to life. Join me, Jason Kirby, as I interview these founders to dive into the hidden truths of how they got funded. If you have not already subscribed, be sure to go to join.thunder.vc again, join.thunder.vc to get our weekly newsletter. That covers valuable tips and insights for those raising capital and for those deploying capital. Today, we have Zach Bell, co-founder of MyPlace.co, a social network to share your place and assets with your friends. No strangers allowed. Zach shares his story of raising $6 million from freestyle capital as a pre-revenue company, which we do not see very often. and how he built a bond with his investors and how the company came about from a side hustle while trying to solve his own problem of renting his place, but only to trusted friends. This isn't our typical founder on the podcast and I'm excited to share Zach's story with you. Let's go ahead and get started. Jason Kirby (00:01.216) Welcome back everyone. Thank you for joining us at fundraising demystified. Today we have Zach Bell founder of myplace.co Zach. Thank you for joining us on the show today. Zach Bell (00:11.374) Thanks for having me Jason. Jason Kirby (00:13.376) Well, you know, Zach, looking at your background, you know, you're a serial entrepreneur, you're currently working on myplace.co, which you've raised in total of $6 million. Can you just give the audience a little bit of background on who you are and what led you to starting MyPlace? Zach Bell (00:29.202) Um, so my name is Zach Bell. I love long walks in the beach and sunsets. Um, but for real now, I, um, I have been building community my entire life and I have been traveling around the world, uh, fostering that community for most of my life and, um, I, um, kind of have my friends live all over the place. And I, you know, I wrote a blog not too long ago, kind of trying to tie this all together called, I could never afford my lifestyle. And I realized that hosting friends and staying with friends. and sharing my house with my friends and having my friends share their houses back with me radically defined my life and what I had access to. So I was building a company called Habitas, which I encourage you to look up. It's a really beautiful hotel brand all over the world that we call it Luxury for the Soul. So it's all about redefining luxury around, you know, connection with yourself, connection with nature and connection with other people. Luxury isn't like the built environment and extreme isolation. So while we were building that, I was traveling around the world. running the marketing and my places were empty always. So I made a Squarespace page and I put my house on it and I framed a Google calendar into it and a form and I gave the password to a couple of friends. And I said, let me know if you wanna come stay. This is what I pay for it. If you can cover my rent, great. If not, don't worry about it. I just love it to get used. That is how this thing took over my life. Be careful what you make on a Squarespace page in a weekend. Jason Kirby (01:54.304) Did it go viral? Did the password go out? Zach Bell (01:57.214) It didn't go viral, but it was like, you know, one friend was like, Hey, can I add my place? My friends like my cousins looking for a place to stay. Can I give them the password? I just kept track of everyone with a password, who I gave the password to an air table and it ended up with like 2500 people and a bunch of houses, mostly in New York, LA and San Francisco, which is where we were all living at the time kind of and, you know, skipping ahead a lot of things, but like the New York Times wrote an article that included us in a listicle. about alternatives to Airbnb. And I had written on the homepage, like share with your friends, and all these people reached out and were like, I also wanna share my house, but not with your friends. I would like to share my house with my own friends. And turns out that product is really complex to build, but we're getting there. And we've had some early successes with it. Jason Kirby (02:47.664) That's fascinating. So, you know, kind of serendipity, you know, in terms of just you put something out to solve your own problem, and everyone got excited about it and started to leverage the platform as well and kind of get overwhelmed. And I've seen a lot of co home sharing types of businesses. Obviously, there's like launch house was more of like a accelerator type experience. You know, for a specific crowd, and then I seen like entrepreneur houses, but you know, this looks more of just sense of community. It doesn't necessarily matter what your background is. I guess where are you guys at with the business now? Zach Bell (03:22.886) We just quietly came out of beta. We haven't really loudly done anything ever, but for a while we were invite only and now we're just letting anyone download the app or sign up on the website. And the thing that really worked, my co-founder kind of came up with the idea. We were like, do people need to friend each other? How do you define who people's friends are? So for a while we were having people send friend requests back and forth, but we ended up just adopting kind of the. like the WhatsApp strategy. So when you download the app, we search your contact list and we just show you places to stay based on people that you know. So it's your friends or friends of friends. And because of the influence in certain communities around the world of our beta community, we ended up with 20 million contacts in the database. So the chances are your friends are here in certain networks. And so what we're slowly doing is working through getting new networks online so that when people come, their friends are already here. Um, so it's, uh, anyone can join the platform, but you can only share your house with your friends. And then we take your network out one degree if you want, but nothing more than that. So it's friends or friends of friends. And you can always restrict people and become more private, but you can't become like public, we're not a public rental site where we don't even consider ourselves a short-term rental. platform, we consider ourselves more of a social network. Jason Kirby (04:47.252) Interesting. And that's an interesting way to look at it. And I guess from a business model perspective, how do you guys make money? You're planning to make money. Zach Bell (04:56.238) Well, we don't right now, which is a really exciting time to be in 2023. That was as much sarcasm as possible. Um, but, um, you know, we think, you know, a lot of our investors, I'll answer it a couple of ways, but a lot of our investors believe that, and I believe that kind of sharing things with friends is just something that's never been put on the internet well yet, but it's something that happens all over the internet. WhatsApp groups, Telegram. Facebook groups, all these endless amounts of groups, we are really just trying to share things with friends that you don't want to rent to strangers. Most people's homes are not available for short-term rental to internet strangers. Most of them, almost 99% of them. So we're for the other people who don't want to rent, start a business. An Airbnb is pretty much a business for most people. So we don't want people who are starting a business, we want people who just want to... Stay with friends, host friends for free, swap, trade, or at least cover. A lot of our users like travel for two months out of the year and just want to get their costs covered in New York. So we don't want to make money on the transaction because we're not a short-term rental site. So likely very soon we'll in unclear which order, but we'll introduce a platform fee. So to use the social graph or to share with friends of friends or in any direction, either on the supply or the demand side. we'll be charging a small network fee. And then our most requested feature is insurance. So we'll be offering insurance. But we won't be facilitating the transaction because it's hard to take a percentage of free and we want to continue to have people swap and trade and do free things. We don't wanna be focused specifically on getting the transaction fees up. Jason Kirby (06:28.289) Mm. Jason Kirby (06:48.388) Well, you know, it's kind of like the early days of Facebook. Don't monetize it until the network is, you know, at some kind of level of scale. But, uh, that's, and you guys consider yourselves more of the social network, which, uh, you know, I find interesting. I pretty interesting impression sharing, I guess really calling sharing assets. Zach Bell (07:03.054) like a social marketplace in many ways. We have to create in any normal marketplace, you have to create liquidity in the entire marketplace. We have to create liquidity inside of each individual user's social graph, which is the hypothesis that we're de-risking, right? That's what we're solving for. And then coming months, we'll launch a feature called groups, which we've beta tested extensively, where like your business school class can join or your entire alumni group Jason Kirby (07:06.729) Yeah. Zach Bell (07:33.378) We're going to launch it with Summit series and Daybreaker and YPO for all people in trust networks. We can jumpstart people's networks. So it's not all about just getting your individual friends on one by one. Jason Kirby (07:45.708) No, that's smart. Especially like those kind of higher valued groups, like, you know, YPO group or things of that sort, I could see that being pretty interesting actually. There's a lot of mutual sharing in those groups organically, but not facilitated through any kind of, you know, it's more like WhatsApp and text messages and stuff. Zach Bell (08:02.442) Exactly. And so we're less like a Facebook social network, more of a marketplace, but we have a social dynamic to it. So when we interact with, like, we don't want to mess with zoning and cities and things like that. Like we don't want to put tourists in business. We don't want to turn housing into businesses. We just really want to get your friends in your place and get the right people using the right places. And that's different for everyone. Some people's, there's houses on the network that are like so nice. I could never afford them, but I also can't even see them. Jason Kirby (08:09.057) Mm-hmm. Zach Bell (08:31.374) because they're not in my network. So it's kind of everyone's network ideally is suited for them. Jason Kirby (08:39.628) That's amazing. That's actually pretty clever. And I think it's good if you ask anything, and I know listeners here at this point are like, wait, he doesn't have revenue, social network, and wait, how much did he raise? And so I know this is going to be a fun story to go into. So you raised a million dollar pre-seed when you first launched in 2020, then a $3.5 million formal equity seed round, and then you raised an additional $1.5 million note. So I guess just walk us through that journey. Like, when did you decide to raise capital? Why? And then kind of how'd you go about raising the subsequent around? Zach Bell (09:13.506) Well, I know this is probably gonna come as a surprise to some people, but I was on the process of leaving my last company, and a dear friend of mine was like, hey, that website that you made is really interesting. You should do something with it. And here's a blank check for $100,000 at really, like, I didn't even think of it, he was like, just make it for us. He's like, I know you're on sabbatical and I know you don't wanna. right now, but make this just for us and our friends. Don't worry about making a business out of it. And he's a smart guy because we did an email, like a million, a hundred K at a million. And I didn't take it. I just drew down on the account. So I never ended up taking the entire investment, but that's kind of how it got started. I called one of my best friends who's now my co-founder who ran an agency. I was like, you want to get some developers on this? He was like, oh my God, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I had been working on something similar. Jason Kirby (09:50.005) Yeah. Zach Bell (10:12.842) So we just started kind of doing it a little bit with very small amount of money, as little as we could spend. I wasn't drawing a salary. And then we attracted some early investors from some early Facebook guys. People kind of core network builders. I have one friend who built Facebook groups, another friend who built Facebook ads. They were like, yeah, sharing with friends on the sharing things or assets with friends is just no one's figured it out yet. If you can figure it out, it's going to be a big winner. So that got us to about a million dollars in 100K, 25K, 50K checks kind of casually raised over about a year, year and a half. And in that process, we moved off of a Squarespace page, obviously, we shipped real product and it started working a bit better. And what was happening, and I can't stress how probably important this was, and everyone, my girlfriend thought I was crazy. But it was a closed beta. I onboarded every single user. I made you have a 10 minute call with me before you got access. And one of those people was Dave Samuel from Freestyle Capital. And after I onboarded him, he was like, I'm a venture capitalist and I'm gonna send you a term sheet after we hang up. Jason Kirby (11:33.757) Just right on the 10 minute call and he's just like... Zach Bell (11:36.146) I talked to a lot of founders. I mean, some of those calls ended up being, I knew who he was. Like I had looked up, I look up people a little bit before they get in. I was like, oh, this could be interesting. Didn't really think much about it. We had met a year and a half prior, which I think this is important to note. We had met a year and a half prior during, but this case was entirely different context. Jason Kirby (11:55.097) Mm. Zach Bell (12:03.594) And so I think one of the things that one of my advisors, this guy Rob Goldman is brilliant entrepreneur. He was like, your investors or your acquirers or any of the people, you will know them already, likely. And they'll be paying attention and they'll watch you do things. And yeah, I kind of came across Dave's play it really early in my career and then. showed up again and here's this interesting thing that he wants to use with some early traction that came off of a Squarespace page. So if the story kind of indicates like anything, it wasn't my first meeting with a venture capitalist, it was my like 50th, but I wasn't raising a seed round, I was about to raise a seed round. I was talking about like, oh, I'm thinking about raising a seed soon. And. A lot, most people did not, I talked to you who are venture capitalists did not, but I didn't like do a formal seed process. I just started talking, like kind of while raising the pre-seed, I was like, well, you know, we have this little safe right now, but we're thinking about raising a seed soon. And that resulted in mostly no's as everyone of them, your podcast probably has said, which doesn't mean your business is a bad business or your idea is a bad idea. It just means that. person. I mean, there's so many people that have interest in so many things that they just might not be interested in the thing that you're building. And it might take you having to talk to 50 or 100 people until you find one person that's interested in the thing that you're building. Jason Kirby (13:41.1) How did you get all those 50 meetings? How did you go about getting those meetings? Zach Bell (13:46.417) I asked everyone I knew and just kind of laddered through my network. Jason Kirby (13:51.128) So that but you so you were active you were you were seeking capital you were going out there and wanting to talk Zach Bell (13:56.679) I was like, well, I think we could just keep getting these little, I should just meet with venture capitalists and see what they say. And you know, I like when I, when I had, when I, when the guy gave me the, the a hundred K blank check, I was like, oh, cool. Like someone just gave me 50 K. Let's go to people are investing in this. And I just did like 20 or like 10 in-person meetings in San Francisco. with like a really shitty Squarespace page, a deck with no designer, and everyone was like, no, definitely not. It was like cute. They were like, that was a cute meeting with that guy. But I had like, I had nothing, but it was something. And I started the conversation. Jason Kirby (14:39.532) And I guess at that point, you're putting yourself out there, you're getting feedback, the nos are in a lot of cases, some good feedback of, all right, well, whatever I'm doing is either I'm talking to the wrong person or maybe my materials or mission or whatever you're doing isn't a fit. But I guess when did it start to click? So one, obviously, you know, the freestyle VC coming in and, um, coming in through a customer experience, but also having already known you is a massive qualifier in a lot of cases with VCs having some kind of prior relationship. But, you know, Beyond that, did they, did Freestyle do the full 3.5 million or did you bring in some additional capital? Zach Bell (15:13.262) Freestyle did most of the round and then we got, it was 2021, so we got an overwhelming, once you have a term sheet, it's different now, but back then, like once you had a term sheet, it's like blood in the water, right? And everyone wants to get involved, especially when you have like a well-known venture capitalist leading it. So Haystack Capital came in and took pretty much the rest. Oceans Ventures, who just raised their second fund. I met those guys that are awesome. They came in and did a little bit. And then we actually made a little bit of space for a bunch of angels predominantly because, which is also why we did the safe. We wanted communities and influential people who would help us spread the network to have skin in the game. We actually haven't turned on our investor network for our growth strategy yet, but we plan on that being a massive level. Jason Kirby (15:49.429) Yes. Jason Kirby (16:10.528) And see that, and I'm glad you shared that just because as advice for other founders, it's, you know, bringing on influential angels. And of course they usually come in later, you know, when there's the rounds established, but not always, but kind of being strategic of leveraging them, not just for the money, but for value add and, you know, kind of being able to hit their networks and, you know, especially from a customer perspective, it could be very valuable because there's a lot of, I would say very successful kind of. prominent entrepreneurs that I would say align with your thesis and kind of what you're doing and that kind of more communal Aspect community building So from here. Oh good Zach Bell (16:46.946) Yeah, there's, no, there's like a different, there's like different outlooks on that. There's like as few names in the cap table as possible. And then there's the, I want, like, I call it the opening a bar strategy. Or when you open a bar, you want like, you want like a lot of interesting people to be owners of the bar. Cause you want them to be like, hey, let's go to my bar. And they all bring their friends and it just kind of creates the scene. So we want, that's why we opted for that strategy. I always had this fantasy of like the first thousand Instagram influencers got equity in Instagram. You know, there'd be like a thousand more billionaires, like a thousand hundred billionaires instead of a few billionaires. So. Jason Kirby (17:30.751) Yeah. Jason Kirby (17:35.806) That's smart. And, um, I guess did you guys do them all direct on the cap table or did you guys do like an SPV to consolidate them? Zach Bell (17:43.438) Different strategies. We never did an SPV, but when people came in and wanted to do syndicates and angel lists, we pushed everyone that wanted to put in small checks into that. And then some people above a certain amount we put on the cap table. Jason Kirby (17:57.664) Ciao. Jason Kirby (18:01.164) Gotcha, so OK, so yeah, you did it in SPV3 Angel list. Was it an RUV that you guys managed or is it a? Zach Bell (18:06.978) We didn't do it. Someone came in and wanted to do a syndicate on AngelList. So we were like, oh great, we have a bunch of people who want to put in small checks. Like we'll just push them all into the syndicate. And then anyone above a certain tier of amount we put on the cap people ourselves because they didn't want to pay the carrier the fees. Jason Kirby (18:24.064) Yeah. No, I'd say I think that's a good lesson to share with founders as you kind of start to consolidate. You know, maybe there's some amazing people you want to cap table. They're amazing people, but coming in with a five thousand dollar check, that's not something you necessarily want to deal with on your cap table. But syndicates and SBVs are a great strategy to do that. All right. So you guys raise the three and a half million. You just proper seed round. You know, obviously, peak of markets, a lot of interest and exciting. momentum going on. I guess you guys then decided to raise a one and a half million dollar safe after the fact. A year later, what was the thought behind that? Zach Bell (19:06.03) The thought behind that was that this might happen now. We kind of were counseled by different people that like the market might be challenging to raise money in later, and we're in a good position now to raise. And so if we can put a little bit more money in, we should do it. And we did. And we did it freestyle, let it, oceans followed it. So all of our existing investors kind of recaps us. And this brings up an interesting point that I wanna touch on. It was 2021 we did our seed round and all of my web three friends around me were raising like $70 million seed rounds. Um, and we raised $3.3 million. So the reason we didn't raise it down round, um, is because we didn't do the trendy thing. You know, anyone who did the trendy thing and raised these like obnoxious rounds, they're getting their butts kicked. right now. Anyone who put capital into those deals is getting their butts kicked probably worse. I just caution that with like, I now have all of my friends who are acquaintances, who are Web 3 experts, are now AI experts, and raising these crazy rounds for these kind of ideas. If you go with the trend of the moment, listen, I think Web 3 stuff is going to be really successful. I think there's AI stuff that's going to be really successful. wildly successful, obviously, but the trends hype so intensely. And so, uh, you know, kudos to freestyle who was like, no, you're not raising a crazy round right now. You're raising a normal round because in two years, when you go to raise your series a that's going to also be normal. Um, and we want nothing. It's the psycho stuff is almost unsustainable. Look at clubhouse and these things like that. They just kind of like shark fin. Um, which is the biggest fear, right? You know, these. Jason Kirby (21:04.225) Yeah. Zach Bell (21:04.814) crazy growth curves just drop off instantly. So, and we've done the same with our marketing. Like we haven't spent any money on marketing. Like we're just slow and steady growing. And then when we kind of hit our inflection points, we raise. Jason Kirby (21:20.684) That's smart. And I think it's, you know, you've got some amazing counsel, you know, to acknowledge that, you know, things are looking dark ahead, grab as much capital as you can. You've got it seems to be maybe on fair and reasonable terms. And, you know, so you guys have been basically well capitalized to get to this point, which, you know, I guess here, which again, fascinating, you guys are launching, going to market. still no revenue, but have raised six million. It's definitely something that is very hard to see in this market. I don't really see much of anything without revenue getting more than like a pre-seed angel round. Zach Bell (22:02.446) It's harder now, for sure. I mean, you have to put yourself back about a year. It was very different. It wasn't totally different, but it was very different. We are closing another round right now. There's another small round right now, and it's way harder right now. Luckily, we have great investors who are supporting us and we're being led again by, this is like, whoever your lead investor is, I mean, that's your partner. fully, you know, and we luckily have an amazing lead investor in freestyle capital is awesome. As are some of our other investors, but freestyle capital has been in our back and they're helping us do another round right now and a strong lead gets you the rest of it. But it's tough right now. But now we're ready. I mean, you have like things I would say. Something that I'll share a little bit vulnerably is like, I didn't expect it to raise a series A by now. But the metrics we set, we hit, the metrics we set with our investors and our board and everybody, we hit them. They're just not financing that right now. The market isn't financing that at that. We found product market fit and we know how it works and it's growing and it's working. and now we need to expand it, but because it didn't hit exponential scale, nor it doesn't have a little bit of revenue that are not financing it, you need massive scale, exponential, or, and probably a little bit of revenue. So the only reason we're doing another small round right now is just to like do some inflection point marketing and start to put some revenue, just start to put the revenue drivers in the project a little bit earlier than we anticipated. But, Part like insurance, our users are begging for it. So it'll be great to get them what they want. And you need to demonstrate some at this market for us to hit our next financing milestone. We need to demonstrate. I mean, even some of the multi-stage funds that we're talking to, we're like just a couple thousand dollars coming in. Like you don't need much, just like get it, just show us that it works and then we're good. So that's what we're focusing. Zach Bell (24:25.47) for the next stage. But I also caution founders, it's like the metrics you set might not work, like the things could change in the market as a whole. Jason Kirby (24:27.98) Nothing. Jason Kirby (24:36.98) And I think that's a good note to share when you maybe set those metrics in a different time and a different market and you sit here and you do exactly as you were told to do and set to do and that should equal success. Markets quickly shift and can kind of have to force you in a different direction. But it sounds like you've been wise in choosing a great partner as your lead investor. And that's what I... aspire all my clients and any founder I work with to really see their VCs as their partners. And that's what VCs, good VCs want as well. And they're buying into your vision. They want to support you as the founder and your vision, and they're enabling you to do so. And allowing you to get here. And now, Zach Bell (25:23.042) Some great questions I was told to ask is like, how much of your fund have you deployed? How much of your fund do you reserve for follow on capital? If you are, or like how often do you put follow on capital into deals? You know, things happen and positively or negatively. And the fact that you're an investor being able to come in and support you when you need it or support you when you're. like or to get more involved and things are going really well, it's really important. You know, some of our investors, some of our smaller investors, we went to them at a different, at a moment when we were looking at different options for capital and they were like, our fund is fully deployed, like we can't do anything. So that gets a little tricky if you don't ask that question. It's a good thing to know about if you have it in your back pocket or not. Jason Kirby (26:19.468) No, it's super smart to get to know the VCs and especially in those first couple conversations, qualify the VC on the other side as opposed to just, you have money? Okay, let's go. It's like, no, like, well, do you have money now and do you have money down the road for when shit might hit the fan? And or when things are scaling and you want to be able to do a round very quickly internally and not necessarily have to go do a whole new fundraising process. Because I imagine if Freestyle didn't have the reserves and you had to go out and find a lead in this market. that wasn't already in bed with you in some capacity, this fundraise would be probably exponentially more difficult if not prohibitive in a lot of ways. Zach Bell (26:57.93) It would definitely look a lot different. Um, you know, having a strong lead who's got reputation in the, I mean, it's like, it's not news to anybody, but like having a strong lead who has reputation in the market, who follows on is also a really good sign. Like when you're, someone's already put capital in your business and they're going to put capital in your business again, and they're the person closest to the business, they have all the rights to look at everything that's going on. If they're continuing to invest. That's what gets stuff done, especially if they're like, hey, you know what? They're like, we're taking a hard look at our portfolio as every fund is right now. And we're going to make sure this one stays alive because it's really, this one's one of the ones where we're narrowing it and betting deeper on this one is a strong signal to everybody else. And even to like, it's hard to underestimate, like even to me as an entrepreneur, that's a 10 know that the person who's the people that are deepest with you, like really have. Jason Kirby (27:55.244) What would you say your communication is with your investors over the last two years or so? Are you doing monthly updates, quarterly updates? What's your relationship on an ongoing basis with them? Zach Bell (28:05.294) I have had get monthly updates going to investors on my to-do list for two years now. I think that my worst trait as a CEO, I would love to, I have a CEO friend that I invested in their company and I have, I get their monthly updates and they're so good. If you can do that, I would do that. I do a quarterly update. Jason Kirby (28:13.397) Yeah. Jason Kirby (28:30.404) Okay, clearly updates are reasonable. I... Zach Bell (28:35.646) And my major investors I talk to regularly, I have a standing every two weeks with Freestyle for the entirety. And that's just like state of the state, intros, advice, what are you seeing in the market? And that's been a great meeting. I don't know that you'll always get that as a founder. I don't know that you'll always get that. But if you, it's awesome. And he's, they don't take board seats. So it's kind of like. to every two weeks. It cancels sometimes, but broadly speaking, we spoke. I've been out there twice a month for two years. Zach Bell (29:14.107) And because of that, I've become friends and business partners and see each other socially. And we kind of have like a third co-founder in a different capacity, in a completely different capacity. Jason Kirby (29:24.612) We'll see, it's like, so not doing monthly updates, but you're meeting with your lead investor every other week. That's probably more powerful than just doing updates. Zach Bell (29:34.198) I would say more powerful for me, maybe not more powerful for them. One of the reasons I would love to, um, I would, you can build hype and momentum with your investor group. If you're doing your updates well on email regularly, um, I could do better at that. But as a community builder, I just see it. and I wish I was doing it more and I probably will start to do it once we get this next round closed. Jason Kirby (30:08.46) Well, yeah, you get to start activating maybe your angels as you guys go to market. And so those updates kind of help build that momentum. And that was something that I've learned is pretty powerful to keep them up to date. Because the worst thing happens is when you kind of go dark for a while. Like I've made an investment in a company that basically they were all there in the hype train. Everything was great. They're like too busy for updates. And then they just kind of went dark when the hype kind of dissipated. I'm like, what's going on? Can I help you with anything? You know, like reaching out, like not, you know, just like, all right, this, you know, it puts a bad taste in the investor's mouth when you're quiet. Zach Bell (30:42.718) Yeah. And what happens is if I, you know, when I know I need to do an update is when one investor texts me like, Hey, what's up? Like got to sit down. I read it. Um, but, uh, you miss, if you don't do the regular updates, you miss the opportunity to side note when things are challenging and ask for support. Because then all of a sudden you only ask for support and you weren't sharing all of the good things that were. Jason Kirby (30:50.26) No, that's a good sign. Jason Kirby (31:10.496) Well, so, um, you know, before we wrap here, I always like to ask, like, what's one mistake in your fundraising journey that you wish you can kind of go back? Now we talked about updates at this point, so we'll skip over. Well, what would it be like in your fundraising journey? Like what's a mistake that you wish you'd go back and change? Zach Bell (31:21.442) Literally that one. I'll go with another one. Zach Bell (31:32.834) I would have run a tighter, like I understand now the value of running a really tight process. I kind of like moving quickly. Fundraising can suck up all of your bandwidth. And at this, I mean, a certain stage of a business, that is all you're doing. But at this stage, unfortunately, no one, no CEO has the bandwidth. And I have to say the months that I didn't get to fundraise are by far the most productive months. And so put a spreadsheet together or an air table or a database or what you can collect as many intros as you can and hit them all up at the same time and move through the process as quickly as you can because you're gonna be spending the money. You're going to be spending the money and getting the money, you know, if you do it otherwise, which is not how you want to be spending the money. You want to be spending the money building your company. So that's, that's something I will likely take way more seriously when we go to raise our, not this current round, but when we go to raise our series, I, I'll, I'll focus much more on that. It also like momentum builds momentum. You're having the same conversation. Your story is getting refined. You're moving quicker. One yes lead to another yes. You know, and there's, it's all happening. If you have like a 10 days between meetings, it's like they can feel that. When like, when you're not the, you know, when you're not the like popular girl at the party, you're not popular. It's really obvious, you know, if you are, it's really obvious. So. Jason Kirby (32:58.04) people. Zach Bell (33:25.654) Being in market too long gets things a little stale. Jason Kirby (33:30.256) I can definitely attest to that. Running a very back-to-back process where you're coming out of one investor meeting and going into the next, that energy is obvious and apparent. It puts VCs on their edge of their seat to be a little bit more attentive and take the opportunity a little bit more seriously as opposed to taking that meeting every so often and not really running that type process. I can completely concur. That's something that we try to help our- clients with on a regular basis, try to get them as many consolidated meetings in a very short period of time. And then even do roadshow, just because everyone's gotten so used to doing everything over Zoom and Google Meets and everything like that, pushing those to be in person makes a huge impact, especially on those second meetings. Zach Bell (34:14.938) I was an in-person guy my whole life and I don't even know how to pitch in person anymore. I'm like, wait, so I take out my laptop and like hook to the thing and we're... Jason Kirby (34:27.584) No, never. Never, never could never pitch in a meeting. And in my personal opinion, have a conversation. If you're pulling up your deck, you're already lost in most cases. Zach Bell (34:33.022) Yeah. Zach Bell (34:38.13) You know, I will say one thing that I had, I talked, I, a bunch of my founder friends will say, and I have spoken about this, if they ask for the deck before the meeting, they are not going to invest. It's all I have seen this and I talked to a buddy of mine who started four companies. Uh, and I was like, did you send people decks before the meeting? He's like, never, they never invest. If I do that ever, they often don't even take the meeting. Like you, your deck is your dry, slidey deck that someone sees a thousand of needs to be so good. It needs to convince somebody to take a meeting. Your blurb should do that and you should get a meeting. And if they don't want to meet with you, they're like, You're sending the deck, you're just giving people information they're likely not going to invest. It's my, you have to have a deck. I know that, but I like to send it after and I like to use slides from it to tell a story while I'm talking. But it's for me at least, and for a couple of my friends, it's been like a very high correlation to asking for the deck first and not actually investing. Zach Bell (35:51.262) Yeah, I've got, yeah, you're in a very pensive state. Zach Bell (37:03.622) I mean, finding my place on myplace.co or finding me on zackmbell.com, Z-A-C-H-M-P-E-L-L.com. And there's links to everything I've done, everything I'm doing, everything that's going on there. And then if you have an iPhone, go download the app, share with your friends. Zach Bell (37:34.658) Thanks for having me, Jason. Appreciate it. Zach Bell (37:40.503) When? Zach Bell (37:45.141) It's a bit of a compromise. Zach Bell (37:49.475) I've had a recording button going. Jason Kirby (38:58.617) All right, so I don't know what happened there. My video is completely shot. I'm gonna have to restart my computer. Zach Bell (39:03.95) It's reported from my side, so I think that we might have gotten it done. Jason Kirby (39:10.249) Um, let's just, let's just, let's just do the last, uh, bit of it for, uh, just to be on the safe side. Um, so we'll just recap on the audio and then I'll send this over to my editors and see what they have to say. Cause I don't want to take too much part of your time doing this little technical error, which I've never seen happen before. Uh, all right, so let's hop in. Zach Bell (39:11.014) is recorded and says it's uploaded. Jason Kirby (39:34.849) Zach, thank you so much for being on the show and kind of sharing your insights. Where's the best place for founders to learn more about you and my place? Zach Bell (39:44.21) To learn more about me, Zach M. Bell, Z-A-C-H-M-B-E-L-L, at everything on the internet.com is the links to everything, Instagram, LinkedIn, I don't do much on Twitter, and all the other things. And then you can jump on myplace.co and I'll send you a link to the App Store, or you can just go to the App Store and download My Place. We've got a sub stack with some blogs posted, I try to share as much as I can, you know, it's all about sharing. Jason Kirby (40:12.745) Well, that's a communal community management growing that you've been doing for years. Well, appreciate you being on the show. I look forward to getting this out to our audience. And thanks again. Zach Bell (40:16.194) You're killing me. Zach Bell (40:24.718) Thanks so much, Jason.