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We’re looking at something founders raising investment must think about but is rarely discussed in much depth.
How should you prepare for what you’ll do with your investment cash once you’ve able to raise it? A founder from the first Baltic Ventures cohort has that on his mind right now.
We also look at how not to build hype for your product, and we get a sneak preview of the forthcoming application process for the next Baltic Ventures accelerator. Read on to find out more!
What happens when my money comes in?
In the world of early-stage startups, a lot of emphasis is placed on raising money.
That makes sense, but all of that focus on pitching investors, while simultaneously building your product and business, can leave you with very little time for preparing for the moment when the money comes in. Then you actually have to do something with it.
Recent Baltic Ventures alum Ittybit isn’t quite ready to announce a funding round yet, but founder Paul Anthony Williams is making sure he’s ready for that day.
One thing startups often need to get straight on with as soon as they raise funding is hiring. Specifically, hiring the right people.
“It’s tricky to find exactly the right profile. The kinds of people who fit really well into a team of five are not the same people who are good when you’ve got 50 or 500,” Paul notes.
Ittybit, which builds tools to make it easier to integrate media into apps, plans to hire for roles including frontend and backend developers, developer relations, and marketing.
But finding the right people can be really tricky, especially now ChatGPT has made it easy for anyone to create a tailored (but boring and generic) cover letter in seconds. Seriously, just don’t do it..
“ChatGPT has completely ruined the job application process. It’s just so verbose and boring. So cover letters are dead for the time being. You’ve got to figure out something else clever to filter people out with, and we’re not quite sure what that is,” says Paul.
“Coding challenges are fine for developers, but what’s the equivalent for a developer relations or marketing role?”
Once the time-consuming work of fundraising is out of the way, Ittybit also plans to go on a marketing drive and officially launch its product. But with so much to do, how does Paul make sure the right things are prioritised at the right time?
Ittybit works in six-week sprints, allowing for two sprints per quarter. Q1 2024 was all about fundraising, and Q2 is all about the public launch. This involves polishing up the product and finishing the self-service onboarding flow.
Paul says he talked to existing customers to determine which features needed the most polish.
“You have to be humble as a product founder, and admit where things need more work. Those conversations gave us a list of where to start.”
And how do they decide what to do in the next quarter?
Paul says Ittybit uses GitHub as a project management tool, combined with a weekly full team meeting. At the start of every cycle of work, this weekly meeting is longer, to allow for long-term planning.
“We go through literally everything there is to do and we stack rank them by priority. We try to mould everything into big themes. It’s easy to think about things in big themes rather than just an endless list of random to-do’s.
“Once we know the big themes for the next cycle of work, we allocate who’s going to do what. And then if there are some big gaps, that’s a pretty big hint that we should expand the team. That’s how we figured out who we needed to hire fir
