My name is Jeff Kaufman and I am the founder and CEO of Wiresurfer — the 'Expedia’ of telecom.

I am a serial entrepreneur, and before launching Wiresurfer, I founded the telecom company Linwood Communications — a telecom solutions provider — and Cirqit, an application service provider.

After decades working with some of the Fortune 500 telecom companies, I saw inefficiency in the process of large telcos using channel partners to reach the ultimate customer.

I thought all of the processes could be aggregated into a marketplace so every business and nonprofit could find the service they need.

Wiresurfer has raised 3 rounds of angel funding with our latest round taking place in 2023.

Each time we have raised a rather small amount and done a lot with it. So far we have raised a total of $775k from a dozen angel investors.

Our valuation and that process was largely developed by our lead investor, Ryan Moore. He set the initial stake in the ground of how much to raise and at what price. 

For the second round of funding, our valuation increased by 3x — the third round valuation was flat.

You have a financial plan and projections — which always changes, but you have to start somewhere.

The angel helps you refine your assumptions about customer acquisition — such as the number of additional customers per month and cost per acquisition. 

That helps you estimate when you will break even, which gives you an idea of how much money you need to raise. 

We had some KPIs that we determined the business was predicated on.

If we could hit these it would show that we were onto something.

Those KPIs were all based on the platform. We wanted to drive more unique visitors to the site and make sure they were staying on the site and visiting many pages.

We also have a search engine on our site. When a user enters an address into our search bar they can see all of telecommunications providers, products and pricing come up. 

We really worked on getting end-users to enter and use the search bar.

We looked for things like track record and experience. We had a unique experience because our lead angel investor was a venture capitalist himself. We leveraged his input and guidance.

Sometimes you will see angel investors who just want to throw some money in — but not show a high level of interest and engagement. 

We like working with investors who showed discernment — they didn’t just spray money around. 

We also wanted to work with investors who had previous successful investments. It shows they can help the business all the way to IPO and can manage through all the changes that scale brings.

A lot of investors will decide to invest or not based on who else is in. Having an investor with a good reputation who makes other investors say “if he’s in, I’m in” can be very helpful.

We were fortunate to have our lead investor, Ryan Moore of Accomplice VC, act as our champion and introduce us to many of our other investors.

When we started I did not know Ryan directly, but we used our network to gain an introduction to him. He has been instrumental ever since.

The big lesson for me was that there is a lot of luck and timing when building a company, but you really have to lean on your network. Everybody knows somebody.

We also have three different advisors. These were a combination of technical, marketing, and fundraising advisors. The advisors helped quite a bit because they know a lot of people as well. 

Once again, we were fortunate because our lead angel investor was a VC himself. Most of our leads came from Ryan. We had dozens of pitch meetings and now we have 12 angel investors. 

Our strategy in the pitches was to show that we had the opportunity to disrupt an old, slow industry. The telecom industry is very traditional; it moves very, very slowly.

Pitching a marketplace in a market as big as business-to-business telecom — which is $250B annually — excited investors considering the success marketplaces had had in other more traditional industries. 

The marketplace model has proven itself to be very profitable and can scale to dominate a market. Applying it to such a large, but more conventional industry means that we can have outsized returns.

We also positioned ourselves as seasoned veterans so that the investors could trust that we know what we are doing. 

We have emulated the early stages of the travel/hospitality websites. They were some of the first marketplaces to evolve on the internet. 

They showed how powerful a marketplace can become — our model is very much in that vein. 

If you succeed with a marketplace you can end up disrupting an entire industry. Expedia has a market cap of $19B. Even if we have reasonable success in this industry it will be pretty good! 

Our model can also be very profitable. It’s like a SaaS model, because once you have the code built, those costs do not recur and you get those high gross profit margins.

Whenever a contract is struck on our platform, we will continue to get a commission for the lifetime of that service, which gives us the recurring revenue element. 

One thing that has been hammered home in this process is that you need to have perseverance. You’re going to have setbacks, you’re going to have bugs in code, and you’re going to have customers drop out. 

Getting the fundraising meeting is difficult and once you have the audience, you have to really hone your message. You want to communicate the things that are important to them. 

Sometimes you will get feedback that you aren’t quite there yet and if you hit milestones, you can talk again. You have to take that as good motivation — now you have goalposts to aim for. It helps you get oriented and stay on track. 

There is also no point in being bashful. If you want to get a meeting with someone — don't say to yourself — they wouldn’t want to meet with us or we don’t know anybody there.

They should definitely read Houck's Newsletter.

You need to have a team that believes in the mission — write a mission statement. You will be pleasantly surprised how much it will come in handy with all of the constituents of your business. 

By having a clear mission statement you can have a much easier time hiring because if you can articulate your vision and purpose clearly, the right people will want to jump on board. 

Having advisors to assist you in the fundraising process and more generally in the company is something I’d recommend as well.