We went through AngelPad (accelerator in SF) just before we raised, and through the program we received our initial $20k funding from AngelPad and $100k convertible debt funding from two VC firms associated with AngelPad (so a total of $120k as soon as we got into AngelPad). We then raised a further $50k from another firm (Inspiration) during the program before demo day and before we started pitching. So that is the 4 logos you see as previous investors. We also were lucky to get Guy and Hiten on board as advisors during our time at AngelPad. This social proof certainly helped us a lot, however it all happened very close to our pitching and so it is not too comparable to a true "previous financing". Hope that helps - let me know if you have any more Qs.
We're still not too "smart" about our scheduling. We have a few things planned down the line in our roadmap though.
What we found was that if we can help someone go from sharing once a day to 5 times a day, that would help them much more than if we were to assist them in sharing that 1 post at exactly the right time. That's why we've kept much more on the side of pushing forward with integrations and simply making it easier to add content to Buffer rather than working too much on the intelligent sharing.
This is correct, we had a $150k run rate when we raised (and pitched with this deck) and the $3.6M figure was a projection (and clearly one which was rather ambitious!).
For Buffer, the first $10k came from approximately our first 1,000 paying customers. That said, we've changed our pricing a few times so the number may not be exact.
The great part about getting $10k from recurring payments is that it can grow beyond $10k pretty quickly (now $100k+/mo).
As for the real "how", I think the key is to first find out something you can solve which is truly a problem for some number of people, and then to provide it and market to people the fact it exists.
You have some fantastic traction and revenues already, that's awesome.
My recommendation, which worked very well for us, was to focus less on articles about the startup, and more on articles about the Pinterest, about all the challenges people face using it and growing their following. What types of images should you pin? How frequently should you pin things? So many people have no idea about these things. Then, often your product will naturally fit into some of these articles. You can write these articles on your own blog, or offer them to other blogs.
We did a lot of guest posting to get the first 100,000 users for Buffer.
Big fan of you and Buffer. Thanks for the tip. I am actually focusing on that now. I don't have much idea about guess blogging, any tips on that like how to pitch a blog for guest blog?
My co-founder Leo wrote a great guest post (could you have guessed?) on how to get started with guest blogging :-) Here it is - http://askaaronlee.com/bufferapp/
Sleep is certainly a challenge as a founder, or I would say "overworking" in general. It can be tempting to try and fix things by working more on them, and I've found personally that it rarely helps. With sleep, if I get 7.5 hours of sleep compared to 5 hours of sleep, it makes a huge difference for how much I can achieve, how focused I am. Especially the tasks that take a little more willpower (which are usually the most important ones) are the tasks that get left until tomorrow if I haven't had enough sleep.
