We raised our seed during the height of the pandemic. 

In addition to the $150k in funding we received from Y Combinator, we set out to raise $1m after YC W20 Demo Day.

It was a grind. COVID-19 hit the United States in full force about 2 weeks after we started fundraising, and threw our entire plan out the window.

We ended up over 50% oversubscribed, and were able to raise $1.65m in total. I wanted to share our story, how we turned it around when things were not looking good, and tactical tips for any founders raising money during COVID-19.

Keep in mind all startups are different, and all fundraises are different. To be transparent of some of our advantages and disadvantages going into our first financing:

• First time founders. No big wins or notable failures under our belts.
• We are a Y Combinator company.
• Strong founder backgrounds (founder-market fit).
• Big market.
• Very early – Freshpaint was less than 6 months old going into our fundraise.
• Modest amount of traction when we started fundraising. Not explosive, not zero.
• Medium-well connected. We’ve worked in Silicon Valley for a few years prior. We had a decent network from that. Again – not great, not zero.
• Never raised money before.

Who we are

If you haven’t heard of Freshpaint before, we are a data platform for online businesses. Freshpaint collects behavioral customer data from your website and app, and sends that data to hundreds of analytics and marketing tools in one click.

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you had a difficult time getting engineering bandwidth to instrument something and set up a new tool, or you forgot to...

Read the rest of this article at freshpaint.io...

Thanks for this article excerpt to Steven Fitzsimmons, Co-founder of Freshpaint.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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