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This week's newsletter features a fundraising backstory with Joshua Voydik, co-founder of Swell, on how his team raised a Seed round in a crowded industry. Below, you can read our Q&A and insights around Swell's raise. Also, an update on recent fundraising marketplace activity and our analysis of Coinbase's pitch deck.

Co-founder Q&A with Joshua Voydik

Joshua Voydik is a co-founder of Swell, a 'future-proof backend' for e-commerce companies, which can grow and adapt with them as their business models evolve. Based on his team's experience in the ecommerce industry, they raised a $3.4 seed round (TechCrunch).

Raising a seed round is huge validation for founders and provides capital at a critical moment to take an idea and turn it into a startup. At Swell, Joshua Voydik, Eric Ingram, Swell's CEO, along with their co-founders Stefan Kende, Dave Loneragan, and Mark Regal were able to raise a $3.4M pre-seed round. Let’s dig into some of Joshua and Eric's perspectives on what it took to raise this round.

When raising capital, investors are making a bet on the founding team as much as the product and vision. What strengths does your co-founder, Eric Ingram, have as the CEO of Swell? Eric's response:

I stumbled on the opportunity of ecommerce long before starting a career in software development. Like many curious people obsessed with computers in the late 90's, I began hacking websites together for friends, and after one particularly entrepreneurial friend asked me to help build a site to sell products online, I was hooked. It's incredible what we can accomplish with the tools available now, but there's still a huge amount of room for growth.

Being persistent and adaptable to feedback has been a key strength for us. You have to be willing to make up your mind quickly, and change it just as quickly when new ideas arise, or risk wasting too many cycles going in the wrong direction. In established companies, there's often a culture of avoiding mistakes by spending more time researching, which often surfaces more doubt and makes it hard to move forward. There is no perfect solution. For a startup to win in a challenging space, you have to move fast and break things — learn from those mistakes and adapt.

Share a brief overview of your vision and mission for Swell.

At Swell, we're building the future-proof ecommerce platform for everyone. It's easy to get started selling online today, but incredibly hard to do anything innovative and new.

Our mission is to help entrepreneurs by closing the gap between starting out and building the next big thing.

How did you structure your pitch deck and any supporting materials?

We shared our 15-slide pitch deck as a DocSend link and it covered the problem, solution, GTM strategy, traction, competition, team, why now, and fundraising ask.  

We also used a 10-page investor memo. This helped educate investors who wanted to dig in and really understand where we fit in the market. It also helped save time in conversation because we'd DocSend them the link asynchronously for them to consume.

How did you use DocSend during your seed raise? And what sort of unique insight did it give you that you wouldn’t have had otherwise?
DocSend was instrumental in our raise. It made it so easy to send our deck and other sensitive documents with the click of a button. Restricting access and expiring links gave us peace of mind.

A unique insight we found was that investors spent most of their time on the "how you're different" slide. They really want to know exactly how you fit into the market and the value your company will bring. So, we used that data highlights in our narrative to speak to our strengths. 

What is a challenge you faced while launching your product?

Before launch, I thought that using waitlist would be a good idea. I was really really set on this idea. It was just limiting people's exposure to Swell. I thought it was a good idea to help throttle new users but also to drive excitement. I assumed that it would do those things but it didn't. So I started chatting with Eric and the team and decided to challenge this idea and open Swell up to everyone. Ultimately it paid off because when we launched, many more people signed up and have been exposed and discovering the product than otherwise.

What are 3 tips you have for founders that are looking to raise a pre-seed round?

• Have a process and deadline. This helps create scarcity and drives decision making while throttling people into the next phases of the fundraising process.
• Experiment with the narrative to see what sticks.
• Get good at telling a compelling story.

Do you have any other advice for your founder peers?

• Be formidable (shoutout Paul Graham).
• Do things your own way.
• Challenge your own assumptions and beliefs all the time.
• Admit you don't know everything.
• Make good friends and pay it forward when you can.
  

For more fundraising stories and insights, you can read them on our blog.

Have a fundraising story to tell? Reply to this email and we'll get back to you.

Pitch Deck Interest Metrics Update

Investor interest jumped with pitch deck interactions increased 12.3%, while Time Spent per deck is down by 2.21%, and Founder Links Created continues falling since Q1 by 8.3%. VC demand is high and founder supply is low. (retweet our tweet)

Read our analysis of the top 3 live metrics for the startup fundraising market.

Recommended Reads

From a $600K Seed Round to an $86 Billion IPO

Coinbase started with a modest seed round of $600K after graduating from Y Combinator in 2012. Yesterday, they went on to IPO, which is quite an accomplishment for any startup. Here's the 11-slide seed round pitch deck Coinbase used and our analysis to determine if they'd be able to raise with that deck today.

Read their deck on our blog.

How to Hire a Product Manager

Product managers are one of the hardest roles to hire for at an early stage startup. What makes a great product manager, and how do you become one? Originally published in 2005, this is the classic essay by Ken Norton that defined the role of product management and launched thousands of PM careers.

Read this on the Bring the Donuts blog.

Have a story or content suggestion? Simply reply and I'll get back to you.

Quartz Views DocSend as a Business Critical Tool

Quartz’s media sales and creative teams turned to DocSend to work smarter and more strategically. “Recently, Quartz reevaluated the tools we were using. The sales and creative team were really vocal in ensuring we kept DocSend. At the end of the day, it is our competitive edge." - Ryan Froats, Director of Partnerships at Quartz

Read their story