THANK YOU - THE HIDDEN STORY OF THE PAST YEAR
A year ago things were bleak.
A couple of our earliest Angels sensed it as it was happening.
I was living in a hotel in Abu Dhabi moonlighting a desperately needed side-hustle.
- We had $1500 in our company bank account and a $3K tech stack bill due.
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I used a credit card cash advance to make payroll for a team that was no longer the best fit; Tina had to defer her already tiny paycheck.
- I was feeling small and questioning if I could deliver what the biz needed.
Most teams would have quit. I secretly wished we were one of them.
But I couldn't.
🤦♀️ If I wound down Play Money the only other business I wanted to work on looked just like Play Money.
I was screwed.
And then we got a Hail Mary: The Series X SPV.
It was an insane opportunity for everyday Angels to invest alongside the Google Moonshot Factory.
There was no way we weren't going to bring this to our community, even if it meant managing the SPV by hand for the next decade like an old school angel group.
6 weeks later we had $40K if revenue in our bank account
That was more money than we had made in the 9 months since launch.
We threw it all into a 4-month contract with Wasim in hopes that a mobile app, a hands-on-keyboard partner with a decade of founder experience under his belt, and some more time to let things compound, would be enough.
Fast forward to May and we were solidly default alive and thinking about raising a seed round to increase the pace of our experimentation.
By August we were deploying capital to founders at the rate of a $15M fund, which was a psychological trigger point for me. I now had receipts. 😈
As we cross the year anniversary of our lowest low, we are crafting a more strategic narrative for an outside raise. We have to because we are already running those experiments we had envisioned back in May -- funded by the momentum of our own revenue!
We are still early.
This next inflection point is going to take work.
It will get harder before it gets easier.
But the market is starting to see the puck we've been skating towards.
We already control our own destiny.
So there is no chance we'll quit before the (next) magic happens.
We are finishing Year 2 strong, thanks to all of you.
-- 💎 C2K, Wasim, Tina & the Team
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