How to Value Your Startup

SlideRocket was presentations in the cloud, originally targeted at business users.
I started the company with two other people and all three of us had income from other businesses. We were building the next generation of my presentation company, so I had customers we were planning to bring over to the new system when it was ready. My partners had months of severance from their last startup.
So we were able to self-finance the idea and prototype stages. We talked about raising money via a convertible note, but decided to wait until we had more traction in order to do a larger round and get better terms.

We had the advantage of starting with product market fit because I already had paying customers, so we focused on building what they wanted. We did a pre-announcement on TechCrunch in March 2008 and started getting signups to our waitlist.


We launched six months later in October, and we raised money in December. So our investors could clearly see how quickly users were adopting our service, and we took much of the guesswork—and risk—out of the equation.