A Black Founder’s Story of Fundraising During Black History Month — Day Two

Investor Meetings Scheduled: 1

Everything, but the investors, is going completely according to a newly created plan. I had a podcast interview with the Dr. Will Show podcast yesterday. He asked me a question about failure, and I realized I don’t seem to understand that concept in the traditional way.

If something doesn’t work for me, I don’t label myself “a failure,” I analyze the situation and decide what I could improve or try a different way. So I developed a hypothesis: “I want to buy original art, and I find it difficult. If I was able to remove that difficulty for myself, I could possibly find a way to monetize removing that obstacle for others.”

I developed several theories to solve this. I tested the proposed solutions through qualitative and quantitative analysis. My latest approach has shown the best results. I increased the likelihood of art buying from 10% of the randomized tested subject to 50% by finding the issues that make consumers more likely to convert from passive museum visitors to active art collectors.

I spent almost three years researching this issue and even paying others to study it for me, and I keep thinking I want the same approach with investors. I’ve paid for coaching with Founder Gym, and I participated in the All Raise community to try to begin to understand the venture community. Still, I feel both more educated and more confused.

Many investors say that you need revenue, but if I’m bringing in revenue, why would I need investors rather than getting a business loan? However, I’m still the person who doesn’t see failure, so I remodeled my business to gain revenue quicker than I originally modeled. I’ve finally created a new system to bring in revenue earlier, and all early customer interviews indicate that once launched in closed beta, it will bring a lot of money.

I think I have about 40 working hours to finally launch in closed beta for Android. It’s like an overwhelming process to finally test your most likely to gain traction method. It’s right at that precipice, and it’s such an overwhelming feeling.

It makes it worst when I decided to try to introduce myself to investors when in the back of my head, I’m hoping I gain so much revenue quickly that I don’t need their money. Many investors often give you subjective criticism. I think that’s what’s wrong with the industry to me. When I was running a pitch competition, I wanted to objectively have a standard to reject someone. I devised a rubric to be able to fairly assess the applicants without bias.

The rubric was good for me to select someone, but I should have spent more time giving the rubric to the people not selected to win. If I showed them how I was assessing each applicant, I would be pointing them in the direction to be more successful in the future. I do try to learn how to improve with each investor meeting, but I think, if I’m ever successful enough to be a professional investor, I’d try to devise a personal rubric standard to assess applicants. I’d also share the rubric with those not selected to move forward with the application.