In 2015, I started a company with two friends in a tech accelerator program called Angelpad. Angelpad is known for having incubated Postmates, AllTrails, CookUnity, and many others.
I learned a lot about distinguishing between wants and needs, how to do a robust competitor analysis, conduct effective user research, identify solid opportunities, establish product-market fit, grow from 0 to 1, and how to “do things that don’t scale” to figure out what the right tech-driven or tech-enabled customer solution should actually be. I also learned a lot about how to pitch VCs — of course a lot of that is an art that has evolved over time as markets and industries shift and new technologies are born.
We raised $750K in pre-seed funding for our company, Vesper. Vesper was born out of my experiences working as a temp office admin while I was between jobs and working on my first company idea. We provided continuous office administrative and executive assistant services for companies that needed support. We were able to do so at a much lower rate than hiring a full time person would cost, and we were able to flex our staff across multiple clients. Much of our service was remote, with some on-site services provided. After onboarding our first 4 customers in the accelerator program, our service achieved a 25% referral rate. I led our sales efforts, doing a lot of cold outreach to companies that had posted jobs for office managers and executive assistants. That’s how we got the majority of our leads and conversions. Almost 18 months after we graduated from Angelpad, we had 45 clients paying us an average of $2000/month, and a low churn rate (10%). With about $900K in ARR, we were excited for the next chapter of what Vesper could look like.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to raise a subsequent round of funding; although we were almost at break-even in terms of operations, we all made the difficult decision to move on from the company. I learned a ton and continued to build on this experience with my subsequent roles in growth and product marketing.
