My name is Paul Muller and I am the co-founder of Coleap. 

Coleap is a platform for content creators to turn content into courses. 

Before Coleap, I gained experience with online education startups. 

During COVID I built a nonprofit tutoring marketplace that was eventually sold to the Austrian government.

I also built a bootcamp for students whose internship offers were canceled during COVID and were looking for jobs.

The first round was in April of 2021. The initial offer was $500k at a $1.5M cap, but we negotiated it to $1.5M for 20%.

In October of 2021, we had generated revenue quickly, but we were saturating our initial client base so we aimed to raise again to expand the types of creators we could bring onto the platform. 

We raised an angel round with 25 angels at $10k a piece - the valuation was $10M.

We didn’t want to push the valuation so we could get more investors in — this money could help us create courses.

We then raised an additional EUR$1M as an uncapped convertible note.

In the beginning my co-founder had been working on a few ideas. 

At the time he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at a fund in Berlin. 

We agreed that this was something we wanted to pursue — so we put together a deck and spoke with the partners of that fund.

That process only took a few weeks to negotiate because they already knew us — we just needed to agree to the terms of the raise. 

In Europe being an entrepreneur-in-residence is more like being in an incubator. 

The terms were not very favorable, but the advantage with this route was that we did not have to go through the time-consuming process to raise our first round. 

We spent most of the money on hiring people and the associated costs. A significant portion went into hiring our engineering team.

Out of 25 angels, 5 or 10 were people close to us that had already been super helpful. 

Friends made introductions to people that already did courses already — we got those people in with good terms. 

10 of those angels were senior operators at well-known brands that understand courses.

The last 4 or 5 were actual investors — other angels that we got in because we thought they would help us with follow-up rounds. 

The best way to fundraise is having friends introduce you to their investors — it's by far the fastest way to build trust. 

If a good founder tells their investor that you’re a really good founder friend of theirs, they are more likely to believe that person — and believe in you.

We got introduced to some that way, but it was mostly just driven by our network. 

These were partners at later stage funds, or well-known angel investors that had good portfolios. 

If we could get those partners on the cap table, the main benefit would be having them help raise a Series A or B later on.

We had roughly 30 meetings — 25 of them closed.

Despite all the disadvantages of building in the education space, it's very easy to convince people to invest in education companies. 

The vision that you can help people by building a better education system really resonates. We rode that quite far — people feel like they are giving back.

At that point we had very good traction. We'd been around for 4 or 5 months and had over $100k revenue a month. That was pretty good for how long we were operating.

We emphasized the team too. My co-founders were way more established than I was in the education venture ecosystem. They'd built a company before and it was doing fairly well at that point. 

We filtered out a lot of people without even taking a meeting or talking to them. We knew exactly who we wanted to talk to on the angel side. 

That helped us not waste meetings on people that weren’t the right fit.

There were a bunch of angels that would have been a good fit — but they had already invested in Maven.

I spent many hours going through my LinkedIn connections to see who was connected to whom. It made such a difference if someone they trust tells them that I was a person they could trust.

Getting the timing right. 

There was a point in 2021 where we could have easily raised a large round and at the time we didn't want to do it because we thought we could get better terms in a few months. 

A few months later the market crashed and it was very difficult to raise money. 

The hardest thing was to figure out when to raise and the trade off between security and trying to optimize for terms.

Having a great network is very important. Peter Lavelle always writes about this — don't spend time networking — spend time building cool things and your network will naturally develop. 

If you build cool things, you're going to naturally spend time with smart people — that becomes your network.

If you can spend time with relevant people doing other activities, that's how you really build a network you can rely on. 

If there's a poker game with a bunch of investors, go play poker once a week.

Try as hard as you can to get warm introductions.

We've had great experiences with both our main VCs: b2venture and Atlantic Labs.