Awesome, thanks for doing this!

I've always wondered what startups are using the seed funding and series A financing for. You mentioned that you received 100k for seed funding so I can imagine a lot of that just went towards building the product and getting you guys full time. Am I missing anything here with those assumptions? Maybe some first hires occured here?

Secondly with 1 million in series A, could you give a general break down as to where that money goes? Is it pretty much scaling at that point, testing other cities / marketing to increase awareness? Like when I look at groupon I imagine they just hired a lot more sales staff and started scaling smartly.

Just wanted to say thank you for the thread.
Very interesting read.

Great thread so far

1. How long did this project take from start (idea) to finish (selling it to ebay)?

2. What do you recommend for a person in the process of creating a website, but is looking for funding? Let's say I am aiming to raise ~30k and family/friends aren't an option

3. At what stage was the project at when you jumped on board full time (like for a salary)?

thx for this thread . subscribed.

I got a question:
Are you set for life?

From other thread:

Thanks.

Have a few minutes at the airport so I'll answer a few of the shorter questions....

It's hard to quantify but in general I think my biggest contribution was bringing a lot experience building scalable systems (performance wise) using scalable development practices. We hired a lot of very smart, very talented engineers but most of them were pretty young and may have fallen into some of the common pitfalls of software development eg. Over-engineering, "the big redesign", etc without someone that's been there and done that to steer them clear.

Also, I have a lot of experience in non programming roles (ops, dba, networking, etc) which helped avoid the need to hire for some of those more specialized roles for a long time (eg we never hired a dba at all).

It's hard to know without being able to start the same company under the same conditions with a different name and measure the difference...

... But I think having a good name (both in general and specifically a good domain name) certainly can't hurt. It's another one of those things that you can probably get by without but it'll make your life harder.

what kind of returns did initial investors get?

How did you get into programming? What is your early story?

1. What was Milo's concern and the angel concerns about launching the site prior to major investment and just having the idea ripped off? What were your plans and strategy to deal with that?

2. Did you create tools for retailers to send their inventory or did you hire people to maintain that information? If you created tools, were they on location or web based?

3. I have to ask again, you mentioned traffic was generated early via SEO (techcrunch pr only goes so far). Organic SEO will only take you so far, and I can't imagine paid advertising with major product keywords as being financially viable (or was it?). You launch a site, you tell friends and family to spread the word... but at what point and because of what vehicle do you start attracting 100k visitors a month?

4. What do you consider was the best marketing early on to bring visitors to the site?

5. Did you launch a private/open to the public beta prior to public launch of the site? If so, how many people roughly participated?

Also, on your site you mentioned that your company has made a difference with ESRI, I'm currently a CS major and I've diddled a bit with GIS/ArcGIS, so I'm wondering if you could briefly talk about that.

Regards,
#

Sitting on runway, time for one more...

This is one of those areas that I'm going to have to avoid going into too much detail about but the short answer is yes.

I've experienced a noticeable improvement in the quantity and quality of girls in my dating pool. Some of these are almost certainly straight up gold diggers but a few definitely aren't (eg I hooked up with a girl who was worth about twice what I am worth).

I think the non-gold diggers are a result of increased confidence as a result of the money (and related things like having a nicer wardrobe, etc).

Who picked up the tab?

I heard Michael Arlington isn't well liked in the VC scene, and is quite a weird/unsocialable dude, have you ever met him?

Thanks John.

So far I see you have mentioned The E-Myth Revisited.

Are there any other book recommendations you'd recommend to a budding entrepreneur?

If you had to summarise the reasons for your success into three individual words what would they be and in order of importance?

In general, at least as far as I am aware, seed funding is used to build a prototype or proof of concept and raise a series A which is then used to try to get cash-flow positive and then profitable. If not profitable then at least growing towards profitable.

In general I think in ideal circumstances, subsequent rounds are intended for accelerating growth... But it's pretty rare that everything goes according to plan. I had a friend who worked at a startup that did a highly dilutive series F with investors getting progressively more egregious preferences in each round... and I don't think they were ever profitable.

In our particular case the seed funding went to getting the founding team in place full time and starting on the product. I think we hired our first non-founding team member before the bigger angel round. That angel round helped us build out the engineering team, move into a real office (we started out in an apartment when we first moved to CA) and start paying for servers and whatnot.

It was a 1m angel round... So as mentioned above that 1m mostly went to growing the team... The series A went to growing even more and expanding servers considerably (both for hosting the site and also for other things like clusters of machines to run offline processing jobs, machine learning jobs, etc).

It did also let us be more aggressive about what we were pursuing -- eg expanding from just big box retailers to mom and pop stores too.

I don't have any special knowledge of groupon but I imagine in their case it was relatively simple to get to a working product / business model and after sone point the cash just became fuel for the fire to advantage growth and scale the business by hiring more sales people, etc.

I was working on it almost 3 years but the first year was all of the false starts and other ideas. It was about two years from when we settled on pursuing the local angle. The series A was last September so 13 months from then.

Well if you don't have people you know that you can raise money from (and assuming you don't have 30k of credit to run up and/or don't want to do that) then you are going to have to convince strangers to give you money. I would suggest trying to network with either other entrepreneurs in your area or maybe directly with angels or VCs but I wouldn't try to pitch them right away, I would discuss the idea, team, etc with them and ask them for advice on what you need to do to get to the point where you can raise money. If you listen to what they say and take action to get there eventually you will be in good shape and they will make appropriate introductions. Don't just ask one person though, find several. (don't go overboard and find 20 though or you'll never have enough time)

It was still in the seminal stages -- there was a very rough prototype which was eventually scraped completely and then of course we later moved away from the whole original idea. The reason I was drawing a salary early is because my circumstances demanded it -- however I would've preferred to wait because this is one of the reasons that, as I mentioned in the other thread, I didn't get an equal equity split. It cost me quite a lot of money to draw that early salary.

Also I should say that it's probably unusual for a founder to draw a "real" salary as early as I did.

Also y-combinator might be a reasonable route for you to go -- the big catch there is that you need to be in the bay area. There are other similar firms in other cities... Where do you live?

It was at a wedding so there were no tabs but if there had been I'm sure if I would've tried she would've let me, but I would probably have tried to make a joke about her getting the tab and my guess is she would've pretended to be upset about it but ultimately paid.

Arrington definitely rubs some people the wrong way but I've met him a couple of times and he's always seemed fine to me. I think he's a thorn in the side of some VCs but in general he's viewed at least as a necessary evil.

Btw I am writing from my phone while getting ready to go out which is why I skipped some of the bigger questions - this will be my last one for now but I'll get the ones I missed next time I'm at a computer.

assuming that you intend to stay active, do you feel that being set financially will make you more effective by being level-headed and not-needy, or less effective because you aren't as hungry as you once were for success?

Maybe very amateurish but where is the best place for entrepreneurs to meet people with $$ to invest in them? Is there a website where people can list there ideas to be viewed etc?