Episode 3: Should We Raise Money?

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the future of Bottle. One topic that has come up consistently is the debate about raising money to help fund our growth and product development.

On this episode, Will and I sit down to discuss the pros and cons of raising money.

Show notes:

00:01:59: Discussion of Will’s blog post, ​“I Exist”.

00:05:30: Debate about the nature of reality? Are we in a simulation?

00:06:31: VC Twitter. Is there self delusion amongst VCs on Twitter regarding their importance?

00:10:07: We discuss the pros and cons for looking for outside investment. Do we need venture capital to achieve our goals? Have we become too dogmatic about being a bootstrapped company?

00:12:03: How Venture could help our business.

00:14:00: Being bootstrapped has created positive constraints.

00:15:38: Had we been successful raising money our product would be very different than its current state.

00:17:13: Do we have the right idea, but the execution isn’t there? Perhaps having money would help us run faster at the right ideas.

00:18:04: Keith Rabois’s concept of Path Dependency. Will believes that we’ve had Path Dependency from the initial conception.

00:21:49: Andy’s thoughts on our advantages. We’re still very early in our business and we’re in a big market.

00:23:58: Will points out that while we have Path Dependency, executing on that path is very challenging. It’s hard to do well and the surface area of the product is very large.

00:24:11: The ideal use case without any constrictions. Each company can set up a store hosted by Bottle, which they can subdomain if they want. The customer can see the items that are available and add them to their cart on one page. The customer then clicks next, they are then asked for their phone number. The customer can either text in or input their phone number. Then the customer completes the transaction on the payment page. The magic is that at a set interval the business can reach out and ask the customer to reorder. They aren’t asking the customer to commit to anything up front, but rather creating a soft subscription with consistent reminders.

00:26:35: Which end market should we target as we improve the flow?

00:29:51: We netted out that we are going to try to build and presell a MVP that allows a customer to launch a new use case. We will then revisit a raise.

00:31:15: Ultimately Bottle is trying to fix mobile ordering and subscription fatigue.

00:33:20: How going after a broader market is more challenging than the initial sales into the meal prep market.

00:38:12: Ultimately, we want to be able to deliver on the notion that if you’re selling a consumable, local or shipping, this is the best way to capture recurring orders.

00:39:03: How pre selling and selling products could help the business.

00:41:34: Debate about what is holding us back.

00:45:03: Discussion about contracted developers, which is to be continued…