How we almost didn’t raise $800K in the worst investment market in years

I'm curious to hear more details about your "tipping point". What sort of metrics seem to put investors at ease? Was it a specific revenue goal, a more polished plan of action, a certain user-growth model, or all of the above? My limited experience from working at a consumer internet startup has taught me that once you hit about a million users, everything else seems to fall into place a lot easier. Of course that varies widely depending on the business, so I'm just interested in hearing other data points.

Thanks for sharing your behind the scene story. Having "social proof" from early investors and managing "a herding situation" to enable others chipping in seem to be critical components during a fund raising process.<p>As a B2B Saas provider, do you feel that enterprises are open to pay monthly subscription fee via credit cards? We are dealing B2B business, mostly w/banks &#38; pharms. Managing invoices are challenging, and everyone is trying to drag on their feet when paying invoices. Monthly subscription fee would be much easier to manage. Thanks for your insight in advance.

Happy to answer any questions about this that people may have.

I liked the network graph, I'm always curious about how much referrals matter, thanks for keeping track of it! In your case referrals mattered a lot. You didn't diagram out the influence lines, i.e. who encouraged whom, but I'd guess that would further reinforce the referral strategy.

Glad to see more posts like this coming out of the woodwork. Our CEO (at Profitably) just published a really detailed account of our fundraising, required reading for entrepreneurs that are raising! <a href="http://profitab.ly/h49ues" rel="nofollow">http://profitab.ly/h49ues</a>

YC companies seem to have that social proof by a first investor from the start (ie when they are accepted).

What was your burn rate at this point?