Pretty exciting right!

But as a profitable fast-growing bootstrapped company, you might be asking yourself “Why did you now decide to raise money?”

It’s true we did not need to raise, we already scaled the company to millions in subscription revenue and built an incredible remote team in a short space of time.

But as with every decision, there is a lot more to it when you scratch below the surface. So in this post, I want to unpack the thinking that led us to make the decision to raise our Series A with Sequoia Capital.

For those of you who don’t know us, it might be worth first reading how we got turned down by VS’s, rejected from YC and also how we bootstrapped from $0-$1M ARR in just 12 months. Hopefully, this will provide some additional context to this post.

Now without further ado and in no particular order, let’s get to it!

Opportunities like this are rare.

We have all heard that 90% of startups fail. What is even more shocking is that only 1% of the remaining startups reach $10M in ARR.  

Now we are not doing $10M ARR yet, but we are fast approaching it. Entering the top 0.4% of SAAS startups will be an absolute privilege, not one to be taken lightly. When in this rare position that few founders find themselves in, we feel that we should really cease this opportunity and do justice to the product, our customers, our team, as well as ourselves as founders and see how far we can take this.

What makes this opportunity even juicier is that we are in a big market. Canva was just valued at $40Bn, Adobe is one of the largest SAAS companies in the world with a $300Bn Market Cap and last year Vimeo went public at a $6Bn valuation. We had done our research, (and so had our investors) and we would not have taken a penny if we did not have conviction on the market and our current position in it.

Now, we have gotten this far without raising any funds, so imagine what we could have done if we did have it. Since the very start, our users literally pulled the product out of us. They loved VEED but also demanded more features and more product. Enterprises and teams have also wanted more collaboration and security features. Our team have worked extremely hard to keep up, but often we found ourselves over worked and under resourced. This is what many people call “A good problem to have”. The funny thing about “good problems” is that they are still problems. Raising capital gives us the ability to get ahead of it, take advantage of the opportunity and deliver an incredible product to our users.

Yes, we could do it completely bootstrapped, but at a much slower pace. It would be super hard to look back in 5 years and think we could have been XXX but we where just too slow. In the last two year, it has never felt like we have had to push VEED up hill, the company wants to grow and intern needs more fuel to do it. We believe this additional capital gives us the resources to build a truly amazing product for our users, much faster, and in turn helps us execute on our vision even faster than before.

Technically, it’s a hard product to build.

Building any product