Look Mom, Play Money's live on the app store!

MONTHLY METRICS

Accredited members: 692 (+8%)
Unique investors: 182 (+10%)
Total Investments: 381 (+9%)
Total Dollars Invested: $1.413K (+6%)

We started the new year short of our typical double-digit growth. It's not surprising. Our Q4 growth raised the bar. 

Also, we slow-rolled deals at the end of January and into February—partially to make some backend upgrades easier and partially because we didn't have many deals we were really excited about. ....but that's about to change. 👀

JANUARY PROGRESS

• Delivered the app. Now let's test our real thesis.

Play Money is cute as an angel community, but our power comes as a network.

Fly, Flywheel, fly. 

We don't get a flywheel by acting like a syndicate, recruiting angels one by one and sourcing deal flow ourselves. If I wanted to that I should have raised a fund. This is why I find 10%+ m/m growth frustrating.

"It's not not working". We are in the friend zone of startups. 

Our goal has always been to onboard communities, bringing deals and members to the platform en masse to kickstart that network effect. Most of those groups describe the discovery and engagement problems we set out to solve.

However, our current web experience does not deliver on that. We need an app to test our thesis effectively.

In January, we shipped one!

FEBRUARY PREVIEW

• Our App is Live, K-1s are coming, and partner pitching is on!

Product

In December we "found our guy" on the product/app front. 5 weeks later we have our first app approved in the app store! Download it here.

Since it's built on top of an already battle-tested investing backend, our approach is to launch something 🫣 then update fast and furious based on feedback.

And feedback is super easy because we've integrated real-time chat into it:

• Ask embarrassing newbie Angel questions.
• Submit questions for founder Q&A. 
• And definitely give us feedback.

Yes, we'll use this to train our new AI team member. Until that happens, you'll get me.

• We also shipped a long-in-the-works investing flow update. Yay team!
• And next up before EOM is everything we need to deliver K1s in a scalable, automated way. Fun times! 

Biz Dev

While the team builds, I am focusing my time on recruiting and launching our first half-dozen beta communities. Last week, Wasim and I gave our first pitch together. 

It's an Impact Angel group. We are up against Sydecar and LoonCapital. Both are pure transaction platforms—what the group originally set out to find. It will be a great early test to see if the differentiated part of our value proposition matters enough.

If I were running an angel group, I'd love to help my founders double the capital on my SPV with very little added effort. We'll see.

LFG 🚀🚀

-- C2K & the Play Money Team

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