My name is Eric Stark. I am Co-founder and President at Slate. We're a content creation platform built for social media teams. 

My co-founder Matt Horton and I come from the world of short form content creation and programming content for social media accounts. 

We really felt like there wasn't a good tool out there that was focused on the way brands create social media content. 

There was no all-in-one creative platform for social media teams specifically. So we set out to build that.

In total we've raised what we call a $5.5M seed round, but that's a combination of a few different rounds that we've raised over time. 

We close the first round right at the end of 2019. We had gotten our product off the ground and had revenue and traction, specifically within the sports world before starting the fundraise.

Our first two investors in that pre-seed round were Wise Ventures, which is associated with the Minnesota Vikings ownership group, and Titletown Tech which is associated with the Green Bay Packers. 

Both of those teams were customers of Slate at the time. That helped us in those conversations with those two early investors.

We continued to raise multiple smaller rounds over the next three years. 

Our biggest round was led by Charge Ventures. We technically closed that in mid-2023, but it was more of a 2022 raise. 

Each round's taken us about four months from start to finish.

It's always been two things for us.

Being able to build up our engineering and product team to keep delivering while competing against really big companies within a complex product category is important.

There's certain software where you can get away with some things, but you can’t cut corners with a product that’s focused on design and video editing. 

There's a different level of expectation when you are a content creation platform. Because of that we've always needed to make sure our engineering team was lean, but able to support that.

We aren't a product-led growth company, we've always been sales-led. Building an outbound motion and an AE team were some of the early things that the investment got for us.

An understanding of the space that we're playing in along with some sort of connection to that space is important. 

We’re looking to work with bigger brands and so we started mid-market and up, which is a different place to start than most startups do. 

It's always been helpful and important to us when investors have a network and an understanding in that area of entertainment, sports, media, content creation.

We’re also listening to their pitch on how they could partner with us, the resources they would provide in terms of consulting, hiring, and just general support across the things we're doing in the business. 

Sometimes it’s just that there’s a good investor with a good track record, and they want to invest money. We don't need every investor to be super active in the business.

The first round is always the hardest. A lot of them were mutual referrals and that builds on itself. 

Once you have a few investors, then it's pretty easy to have a really long list of VCs and angel groups that you can get in touch with and pitch to.

The first round is where you're being much more scrappy. You’d go to one connection you have with a guy who did Y Combinator and then try to get intros to investors.

Sometimes these things came from our customers. Some of these investors come from straight cold outreach too.

For each of these rounds, we're definitely talking to at least 30 different investors. There are probably 10 to 15 of them that almost end up investing. For each of those rounds probably 5 or 6 of those end up being in the running for next steps.

In the first round, it was basically those 2 investors I mentioned before (Wise and Titletown). There's a bunch of angels and smaller individuals that fill out the round. 

All told we have basically 5 more major investors. It’s mostly smaller angel groups. All in, there are probably between 60 to 100 conversations.

It was a major learning that you really need to take those first investor meetings with a grain of salt because they will all seem positive, but then they won't move forward. 

This is the case even when you have really good traction, in a hot segment of the market or even a good time in the fundraising market like in 2021.

The VCs are having so many of those calls every single day and only investing in so many companies that it really is just a numbers game.

That’s honestly part of why raising around is such a burden on the company. 

It needs to be something you are putting close to your full focus on because at least for the founders, it's going to take up a ton of time for multiple months.

We always first emphasized our traction and what we've been able to do with very little resources.

A big thing to emphasize that investors want to hear and is part of why we even want to raise money in the first place is how massive the opportunity actually is and could be.

We emphasized our traction, the huge opportunity we have in the market, and how that market and pain that we're solving is only going to get more important over the next five to ten years.

We've had some investors who we got very close to investing in the company tell us that our pitch was too practical of how we're going to be running the business, which shows you some of the culture of tech and investing.

We've done that multiple times. We raised at a bad time in the year. It was more toward the end of the year which is usually not recommended. 

But we had a lot of traction and we thought it would be a good time to inject some more cash into the business. But we didn't want it to be a long drawn out process that distracted too much of the team.

We communicated up front that we didn't need the money. We’d said that we had an opportunity and that if the process were to go past a certain point, then we wouldn’t be interested in raising.

Each time we've raised, we haven't necessarily needed the money. That gives you the opportunity to do stuff like that. There is an opportunity cost to going out and raising. 

You can inject cash into the business, but you don't want to distract from executing because every quarter is so important in a startup.

Especially since we were already capital efficient, as long as we keep executing and growing, a raise gives us more optionality. It’s been a philosophy of ours to never burn money to the point where we feel we need to raise.

We’ve always looked to be close to profitable as we operate the business and play the levers of burning more to invest, letting growth catch up and making sure we're not going all in on needing to raise in a year or two.

The biggest challenge to us raising money is making sure that the pitch speaks to what investors are expecting and want to hear. 

We learned over time that you need to sell the vision rather than communicating the practical nuts and bolts of the business. That was a challenge. 

Being able to sell a more crazy vision rather than getting too in the weeds of the product or customers isn’t as easy as it looks.

An investor just wants to hear a good story and walk away feeling good. It’s a hard thing to learn and do over time.

The second challenge is being able to context switch between external fundraising and internally servicing customers, building a pipeline, trying to mitigate churn, and working with any internal strife that might be happening.

We got fairly lucky in that I was still working at the NFL and after I quit my job in February of 2020. We had just raised a round and were already making money from our customers. 

We had about 30 customers at that point already, with big sports teams across the NFL and NBA already using Slate. 

At that time it was just us four co-founders, but we weren't making enough money to continue to sustain ourselves comfortably.

We had raised that round and that money had come into the bank, but then the world immediately shut down and we hadn't spent a dime of it yet. 

Our tool ended up being really useful during that time because social media content creation was an even bigger need. 

After a month or two of not being able to sell and things being frozen as people were freaking out, we actually had a really good summer in 2020.

The best advice I can give is that there's always a chance to reignite growth and continue to have success even if you're having a down year.

We jumped to $1M ARR really quickly. We had felt like we were on a path of exponential growth year on year. It didn't work out that way. 

We had some moments where we felt like we stalled a little bit. Going through that was really helpful. It taught me a lot about resilience.

Always try to be resilient, even if things aren't working out.

Our investors have been really great. Charge Ventures has been amazing in supporting us both from a strategic standpoint, but also in helping us with a lot of different things. 

Brett has really been an advocate for us and feels like part of the team in a lot of ways.

Titletown Tech has also always been super supportive with anything we need. They've just been awesome at being a really supportive partner.

SaaStr has been a favorite of mine since day one. Jason Lemkin is my hero.

The process sucks. It's almost like searching for a new apartment. 

You go into it pretty excited. You’re pumped about finding a great place. But then after months of Craigslist and Zillow and hitting people up and being second on the list, you're kind of just like, all right, when is this going to end?

You eventually land in a good place and you're glad you did it. But it's always a painful process.