Comment by illini123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by illini123 | Hacker News Reader

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Have you raised a family and friends round? What amount of capital are you looking for? If you just launched 3 months ago, I'd say seed level, but I don't have enough specifics on what you need / burn rate to judge.

Depending on where you're based, I would look at getting in touch with some of the angel investing syndicates. Also, be realistic about the runway you're giving yourselves. My personal philosophy is to meet with investors in my network right at launch (not for money, but to alert them that I might be coming to them at some point). These relationships take time, and even an angel investment can take a month or more for due diligence. Expect Series A to take months longer.

Given that you're not currently in touch with angels, I would start identifying 1-2 groups in wherever you're based (I hope the answer is a larger metro area). Find out if you have a mutual contact. If not, and I hesitate to say this, but make a cold call to the angel / angel group. You don't have anything to lose.

We haven't raised anything. We're three broke college students who have been putting everything we have into keeping this thing going.

We're planning to expand to 150 campuses and bring on some people to man the phones/maintain our property listings, as well as hire campus reps/brand ambassadors at 20 key schools from that set of 150. Our 1y budget for all of this is <1M.

And yeah, we're based in LA, but we're all new to this and don't exactly have any connections with anyone in this industry, so we'll definitely start researching some groups and, I suppose, calling until someone wants to talk to us.

Thanks for the advice!

First things first, get an advisor. You need someone whose been down this road before to mentor you. Not to downplay your intelligence, but as I decided to launch a company this summer, I went through to all the individuals in my network that could at least give me advice when it came to operations, growth, product development, etc. Although it happens less, there are times where startups fail because they balloon too fast.

Based out of LA: https://www.techcoastangels.com/

http://www.maverickangels.com/

https://angel.co/los-angeles/investors

Also, you may want to check here: http://thefunded.com/

This offers reviews of investors / investment syndicates. I can't speak to its accuracy, but it will at least provide some context.

Good luck.

Do you really need to roll out to 150 campuses in one year? Use the profits from your first to roll out to a 2nd, then use the profits from 1+2 to roll out #3, etc. BTW, for each new city you roll out to you should be trying to figure out how to do it better.

When you've proved you have a repeatable, scalable model, you can take on investors to accelerate the growth.

This is more or less what FB did.

Our roll-out process involves having people getting and maintaining the property listings (a fundamental component of our business involves vetting properties to make sure they will take students, as about 60% will not), then building traffic at the school, and then securing advertising placements. We've successfully rolled out to three separate, unique campuses, and yeah, we've definitely learned a lot from each one.

But it's a lot of work for three people, in addition to the rest of the business development and sales and all that. As we add more campuses it's going to become impossible. It makes far more sense to hire a campus rep at a school to go around getting students to use the site, putting up posters, talking with administration, sharing on facebook, etc. than it does to have the CEO and CTO of the company driving down there once a week and spending the whole day doing that. And even though we have revenue it's still not enough to start doing that while simultaneously keeping the lights on.

We're looking to raise money to streamline this whole expansion process and keep our business alive long enough to see that expansion through. We've validated our product and revenue model, but we need some initial capital in order to, for lack of a better phrase, do things right.

If your current cost structure doesn't allow you to fund the addition of a single campus rep for the fourth campus out of the revenues from the first three, you may need to rethink things, as that doesn't sound like you've found a scalable growth engine yet.

Agreed. Get 1 campus profitable, prove the model. Then expand to your closest 5 campuses. Prove the model there. Find a way to make a lean profitable business. Then, the world is yours.

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