Avenue · B2B · booking widget for trades
Hire a designer and two developers before any revenue, paid by your agency income
Gave confidence to sell to bigger companies; founder calls it a terrible idea on paper
Mixedfinancingteam-process
What they did
After the MVP proved feasibility, went all in: hired a lead designer, a head (back-end) developer and a front-end developer while at zero revenue. Paid for them with income from his 10-year-old marketing agency, which still had 70+ clients paying for website hosting and needed little attention, while transitioning out of the agency.
What happened
A polished product gave the confidence to sell into bigger companies; Tom says he doesn't recommend hiring before revenue
- Stage
- Pre-launch (Pre-revenue, 2025)
- Effort
- Three hires with zero revenue
“Yet we had zero revenue. So, on paper, terrible idea. Don't recommend it at all.”
“with that gave us the confidence to sell into these bigger companies that we kind of needed to get on board to pay us”
“So, I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Avenue: Walk into local businesses and show them the product in personFounder says it got early traction quickly; no customer numbers given
- Avenue: Demo the website widget on iPads instead of phones and leave printed brochuresCleared up confusion that it was an app; early traction followed quickly
- Avenue: Pitch every open business on the street, then focus on whoever responds bestTrades responded best; product adapted for them and they became the core customers
- Avenue: Sign lots of small local businesses first so bigger ones have seen you aroundBigger clients signed because they'd 'seen you guys everywhere'; no numbers
- Avenue: Have a developer friend build a rough version to prove it can be doneSeeing it come to life convinced the founder to go all in
- Avenue: Put a 'Book online' button on each client's Google listing, not just their website