Scaling Our Venture

Scaling Our Venture

At this stage, it may be premature to begin thinking of how we would fully fund our startup to reach scale. We are primarily focused with achieving problem-solution fit and product-market fit before anything else. To do so, we plan to incorporate a very lean model and leverage many of the resources that are already available to us in designing the mockups and tests with end users. Building the MVP would require funding, but we will focus on raising those funds from friends & family, which we envision will be more than enough to get our MVP and alpha product out there and go through a few iterations. Once we are at the beta stage and want a broader launch, we may start to seek outside capital.

Given our for-profit business model within a real estate/fintech platform, we would not expect to get funding from any banks or foundations during our seed rounds. We would primarily look to angels who have industry experience and investing expertise within our sector and then move on to venture capital (VC) firms once we are at a stage that is  much more appealing to them. The milestones that we would strive to hit in order to reach this level of appeal are the follow:

1. Assemble a strong team
1. Ensure that we have a well-rounded team in regards to skills and traits
2. Assemble a board of advisors that could keep pushing us forward & growing
2. Demonstrate a proposition that adds true value
1. Design the product in a way that meets the needs of our users
2. Continue iterating until we have delivered value
3. Build a model that has high barriers to entry
1. Network effects and analytics that give us competitive advantages
4. Prove product-market fit by showing some market traction
1. Focus on a niche and gain market share
2. Position ourselves to succeed by creating a monopoly in a given area

We would consider looking to the following VC investors for the seed stage of funding based on their demonstrated investment experience with real estate based fintech companies (Zeus, Lovely, Roomi, RealtyShares, Rentlytics) that have a marketplace and/or analytics component:

GV, SV Angel, TEEC Angel Fund, Initialized Capital, Rich Miner (Angel), Founder Collective, Great Oaks VC, Sand Hill East, Trinity Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

In addition to funding, we believe being a part of an ecosystem with other startups is an invaluable benefit that comes from being connected to the right venture capital fund. For that reason, we would also look closely at incubator and accelerator programs to get off-the-ground. These two look attractive given their focus on real estate startups: Moderne & VineOC.

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