Identifying the Fundraising Bottleneck
I remember when I first started a startup. Back then, I thought getting investor’s funding was the most important factor in a startup (which wasn’t, I realized later on). I realized that many founders struggles to get investors fund and even meeting. Great startup should never be hindered by limited funding. So, I decided to build a platform that helps founders land investors call. This experience, unexpectedly, taught me one of the most valuable lesson: technology that doesn’t positively impact humanity is not technology.
I spotted the problem. The process now was to ask how to solve that problem. It is undoubtful that founders are having hard time booking meeting with investors. So, I thought what if I provide direct meeting link to founders?
Discovering a Scalable Solution
My idea was simple. I somehow get the calendly link of investors and make an online directory of investor’s calendly link. After visiting calendly link of hundreds of people across the internet, I spotted one pattern. Their calendly link matches with the handle of their social media account and their email address. For example, if a person’s twitter handle is kyungjinoh or their email address is kyungjinoh@gmail.com, it is likely that their calendly link is “calendly.com/kyungjinoh”.
Now, the process left was simple. I scrape social media handle and email address of people in the internet, plug into calendly link, and check if that link is valid link. One great directory of VC’s are signal.
Building the Data Pipeline
After I discovered this website after hundreds of searches, I coded automation code to scrape the information from this website.
After running this automation code (for all the process like scraping to validating calendly links), I successfully compiled 700 VC’s links.
Developing the Founder Platform
Afterward, I worked on the website. I mainly used Javascript and CSS/HTML-based vite website to power this platform. It took me a lot of time to manage to make this work, especially the firebase (backend) and make sure that I put a limit in the number of meeting link founder can access in short time. I spent about 2 weeks on backend and another 2 weeks on the frontend. And, this turned out to be the result.
Launching and growing!!! (my favorite)
Now is the time for the actual marketing! I primarily used LinkedIn and X
There, I generated about 40k+ views, which was enough to attract about 200 users into our website. Through word-of-mouth and constant referral by users, our app quickly spread across the social media. Many users thanked me a lot for making this website and I was so happy that many founders are easily booking meetings with investors through our website.
There was even a founder who secured $50k+ through our website.
The website grew up to 1k+ users.
Choosing Ethics Over Growth
However, as the time passed, I got a lot of complaints from founders that our platform might be a bit too spammy.
This is the side-effect that I completely ignored when I first started this project out. I started to ask this question: should I shut down this website or keep maintaining and growing so that I can get more users. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about this. At the end of the day, the decision I made was to shut down this website as keeping it would go against the morality.
This way, the website came to an end.
Reflection:
This project completely changed how I think about technology and entrepreneurship. This platform helped a lot of founders, including the one who raised over $50000. I also realized that it created unintended harm to investors by excessive spamming from founders. Since then, I’ve believed that great technology is not defined by growth alone, but by whether it creates a positive impact on society.