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30 Comments

50 investors said no to us !😥So, now we are building our startup in public💪

I reached out to more than 50 investors for my startup Float, and everyone said NO to us.
No one was ready to invest even USD 25k for 10%. So we decided to build it in public with other people.

Read more about it here
https://www.addfloat.com/blog/building-float-in-public

  1. 2

    Why did they say no? Product seems pretty good TBH. Do you think there was something wrong with your pitch?
    Best of luck though!

    1. 2

      They said that the opportunity is not big enough to invest.

      1. 2

        Yea I agree with the other guy, there is a SaaS similar to yours that I think is close to $1m ARR and it's fairly new (year or 2 old). I heard about it on a podcast.
        You probably could have done a better job showing the potential size.
        You still have a great product and can have a lot of success with it. Good luck.

        1. 2

          Yeah we have a few direct and indirect competition
          Direct - Arcade
          Indirect - Scribehow, Tango.us etc

      2. 1

        How big do you think the opportunity is?

        1. 1

          Probably $10M or in that range but not in billions.

          1. 1

            It's hard but in that case it's a blessing that you're bootstrapping then. 10m ARR would be an amazing business and you wouldn't need to scale to a 9 figure valuation before a liquid event. I checked out your site, it looks great. Good luck!

      3. 1

        Not sure how they come to that. The opportunity is huge for this IMO.

    1. 2

      Will try my best not to do it. Not sure i run out cash

  2. 2

    More power to you, buddy!!

    1. 2

      thank you brother.

  3. 2

    Hey man we have a angel investor research platform that maybe you could beta test to try your luck(free), reply if interested

    1. 1

      sure man. Please share the link. I will try it out.

      1. 1

        Hi join our discord and DM me and Ill share https://discord.gg/8r6EndB8

  4. 2

    Best of luck on your journey.

    1. 2

      thanks a lot man.

  5. 1

    Best of luck buddy!

  6. 1

    This is very big market. Already there are few multi billion enterprise SaaS vendor working whatfix.com , walkme.com and appcues.com to name a few prominent players. The market is more or less digitial adoption and training one. Wish you all the best.

    1. 1

      Yeah, agree with you. We will try our best to get there. As far as I know, these products are more on the dashboard onboarding and tech side and we are more towards the non-tech PM and Marketer side.

      1. 1

        They have for non-Tech users only. Like everyday users of an insurance app or Salesforce users etc. Also some of the apps give ideas about the overall useage of the app etc like who is using the app more and how many licenses are used properly etc. Anyway i think you could try these out and see.

        1. 1

          Yeah, you nailed it. We will try to integrate all of that into Float.

  7. 1

    Wow, that's impressive and an awesome testament to the power of building in public!

    Any advice for building in public?

  8. 1

    They said that the opportunity is not big enough to invest.
    <a href="https://www.checkoutfirst.com">colorful socks!</a>

  9. 1

    I think there are a lot of companies playing in this space, so perhaps that's why they're not eager to back another horse. Doesn't mean there's not a good opportunity to grow a business, so good luck :)

    Some random other thoughts on viewing your website:

    I was wondering why you're saying that 'Works with all CMS' and 'Knowledgebase (use case)' are what makes Float special? I can see how they're good places to embed walkthroughs but I also think all the tools that do what you're doing allow for this, it's not special or some kind of USP.

    Also 'Free trial is painful' is not a thing that makes it special when you go on to say that with Float, instead of a free trial, you can 'try before you buy' ...that's basically the same thing, you can get caught up in semantics here but from a user perspective there's essentially no difference.

    Anyway, I'm glad you're not giving up on the idea, there's plenty of space for new entrants here and I hope building in public helps you improve your product and positioning.

    1. 1

      this is a ton of feedback. Thanks a lot, man. I will work on website copyrighting.

  10. 1

    Let me know once it's live and I will feature it in https://chromeextensionideas.substack.com/

    Good Luck.

    1. 1

      It's already live brother. You can write about it

  11. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Thanks, Primer for such good feedback. Soon you will also be able to add text annotation at the top of the hotspot.

  12. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 2

      Hey, we will be officially launching pricing next week. You can get it here in advance
      https://buy.stripe.com/bIY8yjb3R63F9WM6oo

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