My name is Jake Mor and I am the co-founder and CEO of Superwall. Superwall lets mobile app developers iterate on their paywalls without shipping app updates. 

When I graduated college, I started a company called Fitness AI, which was a weightlifting app. I got into YC and raised $1.5M — it got acquired.

I found this problem where it was very hard to run pricing experiments and paywall tests — I built tools to help myself with that.

When I was showing all the tools I built at FitnessAI to other people, they were more excited about the paywall tech than the fitness app — that’s when I decided to start Superwall.

It starts with FitnessAI because we went through YC for that raise and it went very well because a demo day makes it really easy to raise.

After some initial success, it became clear that it wasn't going to have a venture outcome — I gave investors the opportunity to pull the money out because I still had it.

Half the people from Fitness AI took their money back — the other half rolled it into Superwall. That got us the first $700k on SAFEs at a $7.2M cap.

We had spent 3 or 4 months building out a proof of concept. 

We were 3 co-founders at the time, we had YC money, and it was clear that we either had to raise or acquire a customer within the next year — we had a year of runway.

The market was also really good for raising at the time — this was mid 2021.

At the time, we had to use it for everything from building the product to gaining customers.

One of our first investors is Nico — one of the best app investors in the market. He's invested in every app unicorn and he's done all the best infrastructure in the app world — it was an easy decision.

For all other investors it was a matter of their reputation being really high and being laser focused on the sector that we were in.

YC Demo day for Fitness AI & Superwall initially.

We had a pretty good conversion rate — we reached out to 30 investors and got 10 or 15 to commit.

We emphasized net dollar retention. People spend 5x as much with us a year later — it's because we're helping them grow. 

We also focused on how lean we were. 

It's different for SAFEs vs priced rounds. Someone told me this trick and I loved it — tell investors you're halfway done with the round. 

This way it always seems like you have momentum. If you raised $20-30k from friends and family, then say, “we're just doing a pre-seed of $80k.”

When you get to the $80k — then you say you’re doing a pre-seed of $250k.

Then once you pass $400-500k, you start to say that you're raising a $1.2-$1.4M seed and so on.

For us it was conveying the market size. We're a dev tool to consumer SaaS companies — but it's still early days for consumer SaaS. 

Everyone's betting on the industry. You're betting on the consumer SaaS industry, and you're also betting on our ability to grow with it. So our prospects were so closely tied to how they viewed the future of the industry.

For Fitness AI, I had been trying to raise money from Nico. He wasn't interested in investing in Fitness AI, but we had a good relationship. 

The second he heard that I wanted to build a dev tool company with one of my best friends he was in — he didn't even see the product. 

We didn't even have a customer — we got lucky. He invested $1.8-$1.9M at a $20M valuation.

It's really a mental game — you need to treat it as a game. You can't get discouraged at all.

You need to get used to the fact that you're going to be pitching — you only need a few people to say yes.

There's no pride in how efficiently you raised capital. It's just about whether you got to raise or not. Speak to as many people as possible.

Also, stack the investor conversations up — you get better from pitching every day, all day for a week. You can make these micro iterations and your feedback loop is really tight. 

Ryan Hoover from Weekend Fund.

For those particularly in the mobile and app infrastructure space, Nico Wittenborn from Adjacent.

All Iron Ventures is also a very helpful investor.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and anything by Naval Ravikant.