Pricing: An Investment Approach

Founder & Startup Pricing

Ideology

Transparency and bluntness are key, as failing fast and iterating is fundamental to any startup’s success. As a result, we’re pretty open about our opinions and our pricing. You’ll find our client approach closely mirrors the selective approach taken to investment. After all, time is more valuable than money; we manage our time, energy, and focus as selectively as we do money.

Primarily, we care most about your idea being a good fit – for you, for us, and for the marketplace. That said, we are a business and charge a fee, and more, we find that charging a fee actually validates your passion and commitment. If you just aren’t at a place where that makes sense, your best bet is to apply for one of our programs over at Incubator & Accelerator.

Structure

We offer a monthly price with a deep discount on what hourly rate the market typically bears for our services.

We don’t do hourly prices or piecemeal services, as we’ve found it just gets in the way of helping you. We’d rather focus on what your idea needs and be agile with the inevitable quick shifts in focus demanded by most startups — without you or us even wasting a thought about a cost associated with said shifts.

As a result, our price is simple and situational in an effort to scale to you and your idea depending on:

• The quality of your idea in general
• How well the idea aligns with us and our goals
• Where you’re at and how far you have to go
• What we think you’ll need us to help with
• Your ability to execute
  • on our guidance
  • on your own

Example

To give some semblance of an example, a typical business startup or fundraising scenario is expected to be a 3 month initial process. Then the full raising runway takes an average of ~14 more months, networking and pitching while building. The monthly price scales situationally with you and your idea; if we like your idea and do decide to help you, the price will be discounted in the range of  85-97% – we’re not here to drain your capital, we’re here to grow it and help your idea succeed.

Beyond the high involvement phase months, we don’t charge at all, but we do stay involved and a resource to you indefinitely. We will flag if and when we think you’re in need of billable involvement again – usually this happens at major business events such as funding rounds, product launches, business pivots, soul searching, or M&A (exit) activities.

Equity

We will consider equity in lieu for the right idea at the right stage and may even join a round ourselves; however, you shouldn’t expect us to be first money in and/or lead a round. To be clear: us being first money in and leading the round would likely imply we probably haven’t actually succeeded in our goal of helping you and are taking a shortcut.

Statistics (to 2020 H1)

• Floor: $[Confidential] Investment
• Mean: $8255 Investment
• Median: $3950 Charge
• Mode: $0 (Free)
• Ceiling: $[Confidential] Charge

Conclusion

If this all sounds reasonable or even fantastic to you, reach out to us – we’d love to hear your pitch and figure out if our help makes sense! If it doesn’t sound reasonable or you feel the bluntness or approach represented here is a bad thing, we consider that a self-selecting group success as well, and we do wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.