Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Getting companies fundable is a high-touch process. That is not necessarily a scalable process. I would say we may be the only accelerator in the world that has done some scalability on that. We have created a lot of curriculum. We’ve done so many now. It’s like pattern matching. That takes time.

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve released a large chunk of our curriculum on Udemy. Udemy has 50 million users. My point is, if you take on the job of trying to coach these people, that is very difficult. Then comes the issue of leading the round or just following.

Josh Chodniewicz: We’re not really looking to tackle helping the earliest companies. If someone’s close, we want to help them. On your second point on leading versus following, I 100% agree with that. There are some regulatory things that are missing. We are thinking about how to remedy that. You could lead it or put it all in. You could put a certain amount that sets the term that allows you to get to a certain milestone. We’re thinking about that heavily.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve tried to work with these equity platforms, but I always end up doing all the work to find the lead.

Josh Chodniewicz: The startup would have created a campaign page that shares their data and sells their pitch 24/7. That’s the beauty behind the platform. That’s the bigger value. That’s what most of the platforms are building now. I do think that startups would still have to sell themselves.

Sramana Mitra: In 15 minutes, I can make 30 introductions; but those introductions would have to be followed up on. The place where the crowdfunding platforms have made a good impact is in the advanced selling of products. That’s one area where we’ve seen a lot of success.

Josh Chodniewicz: Yes, the Kickstarter type of platform.

Sramana Mitra: That’s now equity funding though.

Josh Chodniewicz: It’s not but there’s a place for that. There are other places where that doesn’t work.

Sramana Mitra: Especially in the world that we do a lot of work with, that’s where retail investors don’t know how to deal with that stuff. If you want to play in that world, you need to surround your equity crowdfunding platform with people who are technology investors.

Josh Chodniewicz: I agree with that. The holy grail comes when you’re able to add value from delivering some funding and not just the platform piece. Equity funding as a whole is up. We’re going to get smarter on how to accelerate that.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. It was a pleasure to meet you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz
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