Andrea BarricaVenture Partner

500 Startups

Andrea Barrica, venture partner/EIR @

@abarrica

From Vitamin to PainKiller: Story of

$1.1M seed

2011(private chefs)

2011

We weren’t making money.

Steve Blank, a forefather of “Lean Startup”

“Congratulations, you’ve failed!”

5 Lessons

(on how to bootstrap a startup after burning $1M)

Lesson #1

don’t look back

we fired everyone

(even our customers)

Lesson #2

back to basics:find the pain

Lesson #3

empathy pay$

be delightful,get referrals

=$1M ARR in 10mo

"inDinero has saved us thousands of dollars and reduced the amount of

time I spend thinking about accounting by many hours a week. A

fantastic investment." - Kaz, CEO of Kash

Lesson #4 beware metrics

that don’t matter

the vitamin:

20K “users”“5M transactions/month”

“$2B processed”

the painkiller:

$315K MRR

-400+ paying customers

-growing 2x YoY

-99% MoM retention rate

as of early 2015:

revenueMoM % growth

CAC vs. LTV% referralsWAU/DAU

Lesson #5

find pain first, then worry about scale

“not scalable?”

315K MRR99% MoM retention rate

80% gross margins

Bonus Lesson:

diverse teams win

Diversity will make you more money.

+women+minorities+introverts

+high empathy+all ages

Andrea Barrica@abarrica

andrea@500.co

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