Growth / Fundraising

Question 1

If your startup succeeds, what additional areas could you expand into?

Answer 1

The most obvious one would be to expand into other advisory disciplines (consulting, finance, ect). But,

On Product

• Since we’re collecting a huge amount of information, we can:
  
  • Provide a marketplace to allow product integrations
  • Authoritative source on who the best advisors are, i.e. be “Trustpilot for accountants”

On Geography

• US Market, as it is the largest accounting market.
• French Market, as we are both French.

Question 2

What will be your biggest challenge two years from now?

Answer 2

Onboard the biggest firms, which will have more stringent requirements (e.g. on-prem solution & SOC2)

Question 3

When do you plan to expand to other geography?

Answer 3

We’re already working with customers in different geographies with their english customers, so once we have a more solid product with traction we can expand our addressable market to other languages.

Question 4

Who would you hire, or how would you add to your team?

Answer 4

Developers

Question 5

Do you need to raise money?

Answer 5

Yes. We’ve hit some key development milestones that are bottlenecked by resources. With funding, we can hire one or two more engineers to implement features that will directly increase user engagement.

Question 6

Are you raising money?

Answer 6

We are not currently raising money, but plan to do it in the following months.

Question 7

How will the funds raised be allocated or utilized?

Answer 7

Primarily for productdevelopment. We need to grow our engineering team for faster feature rollout.

Also, infrastructure with ensuring stability and handling increased traffic as we grow and marketing with focused campaigns to reach our ideal customer where they are.

Question 8

Last time we talk you had 3 customers, now only 4 - what happened?

Answer 8

We pivoted and refined our target user to leaders and managers of accounting firms.

From October to December, we initially targeted every personas within accounting firms. We realized this spread us too thin and didn’t address a specific pain point deeply enough. So, we pivoted to focus on leaders and managers and their top paint point in maintaining the personalized client relationships they built while scaling.

Through January, we indeed did make some trial with an independent accountant and a small investment banking boutique but learned our initial product wasn’t the perfect fit for smaller client base. So decided to keep the conversation open in the future, and evert to them when we develop a solution better tailored to their unique pain points.

Question 9

Since 1 month, why no new customer?

Answer 9

A:
We pivoted to focus on the US market right after the US tax deadline, which impacted our outreach and sale success.

Details:
We relied heavily on LinkedIn cold outreach, which had worked well in Europe, but in the US, our connection rate dropped below 15%. Unfortunately, the few opportunities we did get didn’t close. To address this, we’re exploring new lead generation methods such as face-to-face outreach, building our brand as AI authorities in accounting, and blogs and forums posting