My name is Mark Phelps, CEO and founder of Flipt — an open source, self-hosted enterprise-ready feature flag tool built for developers. 

Originally the raise was planned to be about $3M. That was right before the economy started to go down towards the end of 2022. 

Our round was revised to a $1.25M round at a $7.7M cap — which took about 3 months from start to finish.

Before I started fundraising I'd been at GitHub for 3.5 years - I was just ready to move on. 

I was either going to find a different job or I was going to make this happen. 

The timing was right as far as life events. My youngest wasn't born yet, and my oldest was in that phase between a baby and starting preschool. 

We had a little bit more downtime. It was now or never for me. The opportunity presented itself and I wanted to make it happen. 

Headcount. Engineering hires and resources — such as AWS spend.

We took advantage of some of the AWS credit programs for startups. We got $25k in credits which was huge for us.

I didn't go out seeking fundraising — VCs actually came to me in summer 2022. 

I'd originally thought I would just bootstrap it in my spare time, but investors reached out to me over LinkedIn — I had a couple calls with them.

I am an engineer and did not know much about fundraising.

I didn’t know the structure of building a list of potential VCs and working your way up towards the ones you want to partner with the most — so you can practice your pitch.

Now that I understand the process better, I am building a list of VCs I would like to partner with and will be trying to get warm intros from past colleagues, my current investors, and founder communities. 

Before I closed the deal with my current investors, I had about 10 other meetings with investors that did not result in any progress.

Once I began engaging with the EU-based investors that reached out to me, we had several meetings before they invested.

They had me create plans of how we would allocate the funding, how many people we would hire, what features we thought we could build, and how we could reach potential customers.

Flipt was very light on features as compared to existing other solutions. We didn't even have authentication at the time. 

We couldn't really compete on features — but I could position based on the organic traction I’d gotten while working on Flipt in my spare time.

I could quantify and say, “users from these large companies switched from LaunchDarkly, which is the largest and most well known competitor in the market to us because they wanted XYZ.”

There were actual users using us in production. 

We had a few check in meetings, but the time between them deciding to invest and wiring the money was fast — it didn’t take much.

There was a time when investors wanted me to resign from my job before the money was wired.

They wanted to know that I was serious and that I had resigned from GitHub.

I wanted to know that the money was on the way before I resigned — it was a tough couple of days.

They reassured me they were committed and would keep their word, but I was so worried that they would pull out at the last minute.

I just had to go for it and trust them basically. The money is never real until it's in the bank, right?

Then there were issues with the wire. It didn't come when it should have and they had the number wrong. I thought I was finished, but it worked out in the end.

European VCs tend to do more due diligence than US-based VCs do. 

They asked for intros to users at the companies that were using our product to vouch for the quality and the usefulness and all that of the software.

They also spoke to people I knew at GitHub.

Have a process, do your research, make a list of VCs that you would want to accept money from and rank them based on whatever attributes you want. 

Don't just accept money from anybody. Make sure that they're a fit and they totally understand what you're doing. 

Create a database of investors that you've heard from or want to raise money from.

Try to speak with as many investors as you can — then take a break and refine what's not working. 

Don't just hop from meeting to meeting hoping that somebody's going to say yes. 

Micha from nphard.vc . They are one of our investors and the team is all former operators/founders — they understand the engineering side which is great!

Lunar VC — our lead. They also are highly technical and have been a great resource/sounding board for the GTM side of things — Morris Clay especially.

Some other investors who are not our own, but are generally great:

Aneel and Krishna from Crane

Megan from Vertex

I found the book Venture Deals very helpful. It lets you in on how VC funds operate and about how the think about investments.

The CRM Attio is also a great tool.