Stay cash-flow positive to $7M revenue, then raise a small, quiet Series A

Luke Martin-Fuller… who are like, "Hey, I'm going to go do whatever I can to avoid getting into the trap of VC." And there are some people who go ahead and raise heaps of money. Again, unlike other companies, we kind of taken this middle ground. We raised some money pre-seed, pre-product to just build a small team to deliver something. And then we grew to, I think, seven million in revenue cashflow positive before we decided to take some more money on.

Luke Martin-FullerSo we did a very small by industry standard Series A at the beginning of the year from a super aligned investor, someone that understood what we were all about. And we decided not to publicize that. And that was in large part because our members don't care if we're raising money. It doesn't matter. And I think it so often is a signal of, or something the founders fall into trap off. They are in that kind of VC half of the... If you're in the bootstrappers half, you're on LinkedIn talking about how great it is bootstrapping.

Luke Martin-FullerIf you're in the VC part, you're celebrating just how many millions you've raised. We don't view that as a proxy for success. It's absolutely not what we want to go out there and celebrate. In this case, we raised some money because it would enable us to do some cool stuff, especially when it comes to data science, especially when it comes to the core product team that we wanted to do that we were otherwise kind of, we couldn't invest in quite so …

David Barnard… raising, being a part of Y Combinator, raising from YC Continuity, getting mentioned in TechCrunch, that actually builds trust with the community because like, "Wow, they're a real company, they have money to grow," and things like that. But that's just such a different audience. So I think it's really cool that you were self-aware enough to not make a big splash about it in part for just the community doesn't care and that's who we care about.

Luke Martin-FullerYeah, exactly right. I think it makes sense for B2B companies, but I can't see why it would ever make sense for a consumer company, unless it's maybe like a fintech kind of stocks and shares trading thing where there might be some kind of synergies between the audience that you're building for and the audience of TechCrunch articles. But for us, it didn't make any sense at all.

David BarnardYeah. Well, and then even to your whole point about raising only what you need and not raising too much and building for sustainability versus... I mean, in today's day and age and the fact that you are using AI and you're in health and health tech is blowing up, you probably could have gone and raised 50 million or $100 million with the kind of traction you're seeing and the kind of TAM that you have. And then even in the future expanding beyond …