无名创始人依靠吸引力和公开演示文稿完成约50万美元种子轮融资

做的是什么生意

Buffer was a social-media sharing app competing in a space that looked crowded from the outside — investors named TweetDecks and Seesmics and 'dozens and dozens of apps doing the same thing' — and the company's public identity was radical transparency.

启动资金：Roughly $500,000 seed round ($450k in Joel Gascoigne's own account) closed from 18 investors.

起因

Both founders were first-timers with no big-name backers to put on a slide, and Buffer lived in a space that seemed crowded from the outside — TweetDeck, Seesmic and dozens of apps doing similar things. Investors were interested mainly because of Buffer's early traction, but every meeting then stalled on the same question: 'aren't there lots of other apps doing the same?' The deck was rebuilt around two slides: traction first, then a positioning slide simple enough to remove that confusion.

经过

The founders ran fundraising as a ratio game, and it closed: roughly 200 investors contacted, about 50 meetings, and a $450k seed round from 18 investors. On 2013-05-08, after the round closed, Leo Widrich published the actual deck on OnStartups — a deliberate break from the Silicon Valley convention of keeping a live pitch deck secret until acquisition or failure — arguing that a real, recent deck is the most useful thing fledgling founders can study. The post's publisher, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, disclosed in a note that he was an angel investor in Buffer and that HubSpot's Social Inbox overlapped a little with Buffer's functionality.

结果

By publication the round had closed and Buffer was operating as a live business whose founders credited the deck with raising the funds that built the company; the public post drew 139 points and 29 comments on Hacker News on 2013-05-08.

可借鉴之处

无名创始人应优先展示吸引力，并将拓展视为数字游戏（约200个联系到18张支票）；找到导致会议卡壳的幻灯片——对Buffer来说是竞争——并重写它。