Question 1

From a valuation perspective, a $18k MRR => $220k ARR. A post-equity valuation of $15M means a pre-equity valuation of $14M, if the fundraise cap is $1.2M, as stated. So that means the revenue valuation multiple is 63x ($14M/$220k). Can you comment on what justifies such a ...

Accepted Answer

Hey no worries - good question. I have some experience here as I also run a investment fund (Earl Grey Capital). The truth is valuations are decided by what the market will bear. The market generally doesn't price seed valuations by revenue. For example, the last company I founded raised at a similar valuation with close to zero revenue. As for the number itself $15m is the going rate for excellent startups these days. In fact, I'd say it was quite cheap. :)

Question 2

Love it, Alex - big fan and DAU of Reflect. Not sure if you're comfortable sharing, but I'd love to have some gauge of churn. Totally get if you don't want to share current monthly churn %, but if you have any benchmarks of the note-taking/networked thought industry churn and ...

Accepted Answer

Sure thing - happy to share. Here is our average cohort revenue churn: share.cleanshot.com/zEVNuk You can see month 1 churn is not good (we need to improve our onboarding flow). I also want to point out that some of the months have lower churn because they have annual deals in them which haven't renewed yet. I don't know churn benchmarks for note-taking, but I did find this report which puts average B2C churn at 6.7% monthly. recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks Primary acquisition chan...

Question 3

Hey Alex -- daily active user and big fan of Reflect. Question -- when/how would you decide to pay dividends to investors instead of investing profit into growth, hiring, or increasing salaries/profit distributions of team members? Have you thought about any heuristics?

Accepted Answer

That is a great question! Here's how I'm thinking about it: - We'll first prioritize investments in the product (features I think absolutely have to get done). This is the subjective part of course. But I'm a fan of small teams and efficient businesses. You need the right people, not many people. - Any profits left over at the end of the year will be issued as dividends. - Investors will be paid back before the founders get any dividends. After that dividends will be pro-rata. ConvertKit is a...

Question 4

@Alex - Following up on James Li's question, I think the high multiples and valuations work in traditional startups because you're buying a call option on a business that has the potential for uncapped upside and multi-billion dollar potential. A $50,000 investment and no furt...

Accepted Answer

@Roy, We can't make any forward looking claims (per SEC regulations), but our intention is on paying back the investors' principal before the founders receive a dividend. So that changes the math quite a bit. Regarding liquidity, SEC CF regulations allow investors to sell their investment after a year lockup period. It's possible that we could set up a secondary market in the future. Hopefully that answers your question - but feel free to follow up if it doesn't. And of course, caveat emptor ...

Question 5

Hello I see you talking in your pitch about the team, product, road map, etc, but to my surprise I have not seen you talking anywhere about your competition and differentiators. One of my investor buddies mentioned for example obsidian.md, Bear, Drafts, etc and all of these in...

Accepted Answer

Vilem, that's correct - there's a lot of note-taking apps out there each serving different niches and use-cases. Part of the reason why this is the case is because there is massive demand in general for these tools (almost everyone needs one), and lots of people have quite specific use-cases. We have just over a thousand customers in under a year. We hear the reason why people choose Reflect over alternatives is because we are simple, beautiful, and integrated into their existing tools. Our p...

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