To be fair, our business model doesn’t jump off the Keynote for most investors. Without understanding the difficulties that manufacturing brands face in helping their retailers with local online marketing, our market opportunity doesn’t seem obvious. So, our initial investors were a brave group that understood enough of the pain, while believing in our teams ability to make it work. Back then our few brand customers were great, but they were small (ahem…Barney Butter). Since then, we’ve added bigger brands like Chevrolet, Volkswagen, Trek Bicycles, Reebok, and a bunch of brands we can’t even talk about yet. You could say we’ve achieved some market validation, and that it’s time to scale. So, we went back to those same investors, and the response was awesome. Not to mention…they brought their friends.
This is why we’re excited to announce an investment round of $1.35 Million, to complete what we’re labeling our Series Seed. In a world of “who has the bigger round,” it’s relatively small. But, it’s the perfect amount for us, and allows us to build a better product and reach more customers, all while keeping our future options wide open.
Our investors include Launch Capital, Boston Seed, SK Ventures, Common Angels, Stage 1 Ventures and over 30 individual investors that include Jean Hammond, Walt Winshall, Michael Mark, Mike Dornbrook, Rich Greenfield, Adam Berrey, Dave Balter, David Kaufmann, and much too more to list. As always, a huge thanks to our first investor, Tech Stars, especially Katie Rae, Reed Sturtevant, and David Cohen. They were always available, always helpful, and proof that the TechStars program extends far beyond Demo Day.
A special note to the Promoboxxers. They say a start-up CEO’s primary job is raising money, and you can raise money by showing traction, so thank you all for making my job incredibly easy. First, to my co-founders Dan, Sonciary, and Jamie, then to Janet the sales machine, then the first big wave of team members Karl, Hope and Emma, and finally to the new wave – Benjamin, Don, Spencer, Julia, and Eliza. You guys rock.
To sum it up, the core value of our business model is about combining local retailers together to create something much more valuable to the brands. So, by working with our angels/local micro-seeds and our team we’ve started to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Onward!
Ben
