This month was the first really full month for me working on Bento. This is a good occasion to start writing a monthly update and reflecting on progress made + what’s next !
For the holding
Found a name ! It was difficult. Since we're not in a particular industry, we needed something generic but which also means something. After many ideas, and an Instagram poll to settle the debate - Bento was born. A lunch box with many delicious products :)
Found an office ! I’m at WeWork with the all-access membership (can go to any of the offices around the world). Most of the days, I’m at the one in the 9th district of Paris, rue Jules Lefebvre. It’s awesome and there’s a rooftop with a crazy 360-view of Paris.
Launched a website ! It’s at https://bento.fyi, using another indie hacker product, potion.so. It was really easy to use and get started, and the snippet injection to add some custom css was also very handy. Kudos to @noahwbragg
Changing my current role on Linkedin drove some interest. I got some messages from VCs, who are generally disappointed that it’s not a potential proptech-fintech-future-unicorn-in-6-months, but hey, sorry not sorry 🤷🏻♂️
On the funding side, I wanted to explore the possibility of raising debt along with the personal capital I can put it. Had a few conversations with potential financial partners. Also many rejections. A few takeaways :
Company could borrow with banks (or BPI) around half of what we have in the bank. So if we have, let’s say, 400K€ of capital, someone like iii-financement could find us 200k in debt. A bit less than I expected, but at least it feels really doable.
Qonto x October could help us borrow like 25k. And we need 100k ARR first. Not super appealing.
Revenue Based Financing platforms, such as Pipe or Founderpath in the US or Karmen/Silvr/Unlimitd in France could also be partners. Founderpath CEO Nathan Latka told me they can finance part of an acquisition if we can connect the Stripe account of the target.
I sense that I could convince quite a lot of business angels for an equity deal. It could make more sense than an institutional partner, especially for being aligned on a long term view, and especially if we can organize some regular liquidity events, such as what Convertkit or Enduring Ventures seem to be doing with annual/bi-annual equity sales & buybacks.
I negotiated an annual contract with Salesforce for our Heroku expenses for all products. Should cut our expenses by a good 40% !
For looking at new acquisition targets, I didn’t do much. It requires a lot of time to go through each possible marketplace listings, activate network, meet sellers etc. I do have some interesting deals to look at, but with no time to go deeper. Thinking about hiring an intern ASAP to help with this, with a profile similar to VC analysts. Started a description (in French) : https://ebellity.notion.site/Bento-Stage-Acquisitions-513ace7652d24104b64281fa72b417f7
For the main products
For SurveyNuts, I did some dev work for small stuff myself. Going forward, the priority now is to step up our UX/UI game and stability & speed of the product (instead of adding features). Worked a few contractors to do user research and pitch design proposal. Hired Alice to start working on a full redesign.
For Velocity, which I acquired just before the summer, I made a complete switch from Braintree to Stripe for our billing system, which was needed for several reasons. We know have a clean slate, and can settle the last payment with the former owner. Ben (my tech guru) helped me for highly technical issues on Velocity architecture and will keep helping out going forward. Hired Stephanie to do Marketing & biz dev work part-time.
For Seasons, I didn’t do much. Need to do more in October !
For the smaller products
For HeyCrowd, hired an iOS dev to do an update of the app which has not been touched in many years. It’s either this and trying to at least get some activity and a new strategy, or we should shut it down. Can’t stop thinking that it’s an asset worth keeping and well, there’s of course a bit of sentimental value
For PollBagel, improved the front-end / UX a bit, and testing a small AdWords campaign. Thinking there might be a play in increasing audience for a free poll creation product + ads monetization. And could serve as a lead magnet for SurveyNuts.
Have shut down Manicoti after doing some thinking - could not think of a viable strategy going forward.
Thoughts
Although it makes a lot of business sense to work only with a network of full-remote freelancers, I’m starting to feel the loneliness of the solo-preneur come back after several years working with bigger startup teams and doing a lot of management. Thinking I probably need a core team of at least 1 or 2 full-time people, ideally senior, and regularly coming to the office. Might not be financially possible right away, but that’s a good objective.
After getting in touch with Nicolas Bustamante, he mentioned Tiny and Constellation Software as inspiring models for Bento. I had study Tiny a lot, but never took the time to explore Constellation more as it felt too big and out of reach. I did some reading this week and it’s super inspiring. Mark Leonard started Constellation ~25 years ago with 30 million USD of capital raised and now Constellation is worth >30 billion ! Just by acquiring small vertical software companies, putting a good organization in place, and keeping at it. It also lead me to discover the podcast by the folks at Verne which is a gem in this space : https://www.vernehq.com/blog