My name is Norman Seth Rogers. I am the founder and CEO of Kno — an at-home STD testing company that encourages users to share their results privately.

2% of the young people who should be tested are actually doing it — That's a problem. 

We are trying to rewrite the social framework around testing by creating the expectation that you have sharable results on your phone. 

I am a serial entrepreneur from a family of entrepreneurs. I have helped build businesses in the retail, health, and wellness spaces.

I am lucky to have a lot of people in my life who believe in me. Most have seen me perform in other roles and were willing to bet on me again. 

In the last year we raised $500k on a SAFE at a $10M cap. We plan to raise another $300k to make our way towards being cash flow positive. 

Raising capital is time consuming. If you can bootstrap — do it. Given the legal and operational requirements of a medical company, we knew we would need investors' help. 

Between the HIPPA compliant software development, lawyers, and inventory we needed capital — so we opened a SAFE. 

We arrived at our valuation by calculating 1% of the serviceable addressable market (SAM). 

The SAM is just under $1B for the STD testing market, so we valued the company at $10M or 1% of the market. 

We expect to capture 10% or more of the SAM — to create at least a 10x for our investors.

Beyond the obvious physical needs, we knew we would need to change hearts and minds. Most people don’t get STD tested even when they know they should. 

We would need to experiment with how to shift hearts and minds through advertising. 

Much of our spending goes to micro testing ad concepts — imagery and text to create a self-sustaining engine of direct response advertising. 

We will typically run an ad for a few days until it spends the required CAC. If it exceeds that cost, we turn it off. 

Until we become cash flow positive the majority of spend will go toward this type of experiment. We are very close to finding ads that can scale. 

There is not an abundance of institutional capital willing to make a bet in the sexual health space. Because of this, we are focused on angel investment and small personal funds that get the value. 

We mostly targeted investors that we have worked with before.

Since we have previously attained profitable exits with them in the past, we were easily able to present the idea and the opportunity to them.

Warm introductions to high-net-worth individuals have also been key to fundraising. 

We reached out to hundreds of potential investors. We have had meetings with 20 to 30 potential investors and ended up receiving checks from 7 of them.

Our strategy was to emphasize the size of the market. 

Healthcare is one of the biggest sectors in the economy and even if we only take a small slice of the total addressable market — we’ll still be a very big company.

We are very reasonably presenting this company as a business that can grow to $1B in revenue.

Creating a placeholder deadline is an effective strategy for people who ask how long they have to decide. 

Simply stating, “most people who are going to invest make up their mind in 2 weeks. If you are still on the fence in 2 weeks, it's probably not for you.”

The biggest challenge is how time consuming it is. I am a solo founder so it is difficult to put in the hours required, while also growing the business.

I had a co-founder who was supposed to take on the technical role, but his previous company was acquired by a public company, and he was offered a compensation package to stay on during the transition — an offer he couldn't turn down.

This created some challenges because, in addition to managing the areas of the business where I have more experience, I've also had to lead our software development team.

That takes away from the time I should be spending keeping the funding rolling. 

I met a potential investor in the men’s bathroom line for a Jewel concert. The next day, he gave me a tour of his company and let me fly his small aircraft. 

Then he introduced me to an actual investor. 

If that sounds random, get used to it. I have more funding stories that sound like that than straight line introductions. 

The first piece of advice I would give is that fundraising is difficult, but not complicated.

The most obvious advice is the most powerful. 

Get in front of as many people as possible and tell your story. If you haven’t generated a serious pitch while waiting in the line for the bathroom you aren’t talking enough. 

Even if the person to whom you are pitching to declines to move forward, they might know someone who would be interested.

If someone says their uncle might be interested, follow through on getting that intro. 

When a potential investor mentions they have friends who invest with them, take it seriously. That person might become the foundation of your capital desk. 

The best resource for a person about to embark on their first fundraising attempt is to talk to someone who has done it.

Specifically, talk to someone who has gone through the grind of talking to hundreds of people until they convinced someone to send them a check.

That person will help you figure out what not to do, because there are so many ways to waste time and effort when fundraising — it's already a time-expensive process.