Indiez raised $500K in just 4 hours. 💥
Welcoming Haresh Chawla as the seed investor of Indiez.
Source: psdgraphic.com
Welcoming Haresh Chawla as the seed investor of Indiez.
At Indiez, we’re building a community of top class software talent, we get projects for our members and take care of end to end management. Indiez was founded by Nitesh Agrawal, Ishan Shrivastava, Amrose Birani and Archit.
Indiez has been a profitable business since its inception. Our business model is very simple — Get work for people and keep 20% of the paid amount for ourselves. Because of this, we have been able to bootstrap with a very little investment for more than a year.
Not to mention, bootstrapping was a challenging thing to do! We used to undercut our spending habits significantly just to pay salaries of few talented team members and bear the losses on a few projects. We used to eat here:
Laxmi, a cheap outlet near our house.
so that our members, employees and advisors could eat here: 😄
However, we were able to figure out a product market fit early on and realized that an investment can accelerate our growth significantly. We needed some investment to grow the business and build a quality product by hiring great talent! We decided to knock the doors of VCs and Angels. 🤑
We spoke to a few VCs and Angels to understand what they want to hear and what excites them. This gave us an insight into how to present our story. However, as you can imagine, we got it quite wrong the first time. Our story was not showcasing the technology and we were not able to communicate the market potential. 🔪
We made several versions of pitch deck and took inputs from Zishaan Hayath (Active Angel Investor. Investor in Ola, Housing), Beerud Sheth (Co-Founder, Elance) and Rajinder Balaraman (VC, Matrix Partners). The inputs were immensely valuable and I’m thankful to them for giving honest and blunt feedback!
We iterated and iterated. ✍️ ✍️
We focused a lot on building the pitch deck because its importance is evident as it creates an impression before you even meet an investor. And first impression matters!
We took a lot of learning from Airbnb’s and Mattermark’s deck. They were precise, beautiful and carried a great story to tell. Here’s where you can find them — Link.
This was our final version of investment deck: (Yes, we are making it public!)
Indiez investment pitch.
If you like it, share it with your friends who could use this in their fundraising process. Tweet to share.
Then our meeting with Haresh was scheduled.
A brief background on Haresh:
I first met Haresh along with Ravish when we just started IREF post its aquisition. He was an early investor of Housing. During the meeting, one thing was clear… his knowledge along with his vision was incredible. What we learned from him in the first meeting clearly opened up our horizons and we used the learnings from that meeting throughout our journey of building IREF.
Haresh is a seasoned tech veteran and respected leader. Presently he is a partner with True North (India Value Fund) which manages a multi billion dollar portfolio. He is known for his leadership role as founding CEO of Network 18 group. Under his leadership Network 18 group became a media giant with 11 TV channels reaching 300 million viewers.
He played a pioneering role in the consumer internet revolution in India. He is credited with building India’s largest and most well-known internet businesses like Moneycontrol, Bookmyshow, Yatra, Firstpost and Homeshop18.
His writings are very insightful and can be found here — Founding Fuel
Coming to our meeting… Our meeting was scheduled for an hour.
And as we expected our pitch deck helped!
10 mins into the conversation he clearly understood the problem we are on to, our solution and the potential. In fact, he went on to apply his experience to paint a picture of the future which was exactly in sync with ours! His questions were bang on and showed his understanding of our business.
Few ideas/differentiating factors he pointed out in our first meeting like “We take pride in what we do”, “Solution Selling” and “Startup Speed for Enterprises” are our key selling pointers now!
It was evident that we were speaking to an insanely talented person who would be a great partner!
Our one-hour meeting turned into a 2.5 hour meeting. He stopped us in the middle of the conversation to ask the terms, we discussed the terms a little and then he went on to meet someone else.
We went out, discussed and realized that we have an amazing deal on the table! We called him after 10 mins and went back to meet him again, discussed the terms and finalized the deal.
He asked us if we needed money to pay any bills and if he should write us a cheque! 🙌
We were like…
Hurray!
We raised $500K in 4 hours while getting an amazing partner and an amazing deal. 😎
Along with Haresh, a close friend who helped us in our bootstrapping also invested. We are really grateful to him!
So why did we raise?
The money raised will be used to build our technology and expand into US market. We have clear milestones to achieve with this investment and are working hard towards that! 🚀
We are proud to have a partner like Haresh onboard. His views are authentic, out of the box and display decades of experience.
Every minute that we have spent with him till now has made us better entrepreneurs and has helped Indiez tremendously.
We are thankful to Haresh for trusting in us! We are committed to building a legendary company that will shape up the future of work together with him!
Some tips that we learned during our fundraising process:
Story: Speak to Investors in your network to understand what they want to hear- get you story right and make it resonate with them. We did the same by showing traction and a huge opportunity.
Pitch Deck: Work on your deck. It matters. Don’t create a few powerpoint business slides. Make it clear, concise and easy to understand.
Connection: Get connected via someone else and have them sell you first! We were connected by a good friend and senior executive from Housing. Hence, the trust was built even before our meeting.
Define: Have a clear problem statement.
Belief: Believe in what you are doing and communicate that belief clearly. Bootstrapping was tough- but we managed our way through and grew phenomenally!
So excited to build the #futureofwork! 🔥
If you have anything to discuss about how the #futureofwork is going to shape up, raising investment or how we build amazing products or you just want to say hello, feel free to drop a message at nitesh@indiez.io.
P.S. Thanks for reading this far! If you found value in this, I’d really appreciate it if you appreciate this post (by clicking the 👏 button) so other people can see it!.