On-demand access to capital allows founders to focus on growth, not fundraising.
When you’re trying to grow a SaaS business, the number of challenges you face can feel endless. Unlike running hurdles on a track where your obstacles come sequentially, these growth challenges come all at once. Your resources - money, people, time - are all painfully limited, so you must constantly trade off how and where you focus your energy. Many promising new SaaS businesses fail not because they couldn’t obtain funding or didn’t have a viable product, but because they couldn’t address all of their challenges quickly enough.
The four most time-consuming priorities that require your personal attention in order to grow your SaaSCo are:
Product-Market Fit (PMF)
As we discussed in our last post, achieving PMF is crucial to your ability to grow your SaaSCo. It is the gauge by which investors and potential customers will evaluate your business. Plus, if you don’t have a product or if you try to sell it in the wrong market, you have nothing. The sad reality is, if you fail to achieve PMF or if you run out of runway before you’re able to achieve it, your growth will stall and you will quickly become one of the 90% of startups who don’t make it. As the captain steering the ship, founders need to stay very close to the effort of achieving PMF.
Recruiting
You can’t grow your SaaSCo without any people to build your product. Especially in the early stages of growth, finding the right people who fit the culture and needs of your business is crucial. This is why founders typically remain involved in the hiring process during early stages.
Signing Early Customers
Founders are usually very involved in initial sales for two great reasons. First, a founder’s involvement increases the likelihood of landing those oh-so-valuable early customers. Second, these initial deals afford you an opportunity to understand your customer’s experience with your product, providing a great chance to feed critical learning back into the development of your product and make any necessary adjustments to your PMF.
Fundraising
Of course, none of the above is possible without funding. For this reason, fundraising usually takes first priority and unfortunately ends up zapping most of a founder’s time and attention.
Each of these challenges must be addressed if you want to successfully grow your SaaSCo. Yet they must all somehow be addressed simultaneously. And while you might do your best to give each of them the attention they deserve, the more you give to one, the less you’re able to give to another. For this reason, at crucial stages of growth, your time is more valuable than normal. Each minute you spend inefficiently is compounded by the opportunity cost of having not spent that minute on one of your many other priorities.
The flip side of this is, if you can find a way to spend less time on one challenge, you can repurpose that time and invest it in a way that further advances your business. So, where are your opportunities? Where among these four pressing priorities can you find a way to spend your time more efficiently? Well, if you want to get it right, challenges #1-3 do in fact require hands-on involvement from founders. But #4, Fundraising, is where you can get creative and greatly reduce the time required to obtain capital.
The average term sheet requires 30 meetings. If each meeting lasts an hour and requires another hour or two in preparation and debrief, each round of funding requires about 90 hours of one person’s time (and usually requires the involvement of all founding members and key staff). Think of all you and your team could accomplish in that precious time: the product you could be developing, the people you could be hiring and bringing on board, the customers you could be signing...
As a SaaSCo founder, raising capital is one of your greatest time-sucks. And when you have so many other pressing issues to attend to, such a time-consuming process just... sucks.
Fortunately, there’s a way to substantially reduce the overwhelming time-suck that is Fundraising.
At Capchase, we help you grow your SaaSCo by setting you up with the working capital you need, when you need it. But we also enable your growth in another way. We eliminate the time-consuming process of raising capital which, in turn, frees you up to spend your precious time on the other crucial activities that will grow your business.
So how is raising capital with Capchase so much easier than doing so through traditional Static funding? Simply put, our streamlined process is tech-enabled and data-driven. Traditional fundraising requires back-to-back investor meetings and hours of preparing and reviewing term sheets. With Capchase, you share basic information about your business and our blazing fast process can generate a term sheet in minutes. As long as you have at least six months of revenue-generating history, that’s all we need to get started.
Learn more about our fast and flexible financing options and join the Non-Dilution Revolution!
