In the early days of a startup, you try to gain traction from wherever possible. Every forum, every community, every relevant content platform, nothing is left untouched. Back in 2015, I had an idea for a newsletter where I would summarise and share the best of non fiction articles, books, podcasts and videos.
It came out of my own need of needing to summarise what I read. I was forgetting content that I read at the same pace I was consuming it. I simply created a landing page, posted it on Betalist and well…. forgot about it.
Few months later checking the newsletter dashboard came up with a sweet surprise. Hundreds of subscribers, without a single piece of content, from all around the world. That traction made me realise I was onto something. From getting funded in my second last semester to scaling the entire venture to half a million monthly users, this is where everything started.
Original Title – How Betalist got us funded.
The mention of Betalist in the title, while it definitely came in from a place of gratitude was also done to ensure get some more love from the site on social media and build on the traction received from that channel.
A few weeks back our startup , Brevity, got featured at Betalist. For those who don’t know about Betalist, it’s a great site to acquire pre-launch users. All you need is a great idea, the ability to articulate it in simple words and , obviously, a neat, dashing landing page where users can sign up for your product.
If you ever get featured on Betalist, they ask you to share your story about how Betalist helped your startup as a token of appreciation for the site. I received the same email and today I am writing this post because I have a story to share.
For the past 8 months or so, I have been working on a news app that provides news in a radically different manner. Unfortunately , I felt into the trap of making it “perfect” enough before launching it to the public. The result- despite creating 5–6 completely different versions of the app, I haven’t been able to launch it even now.
On the other hand, Brevity was never intended to be a startup. More of a fun, side project. How much did I spend on introducing it to the world? 1 day. Yes, in a day, I created the website, logo, graphics , description and submitted it to Betalist and……forgot about it.
When the last time I checked how many people have signed up, it was in the late 30s. Few months later, I checked my list again, and it had reached up to 400 people approx. I refreshed the page again, it was definitely not a bug. I knew that Brevity might have received some mention somewhere resulting into these many new users without a single second of effort from my side I googled, and there we were, featured on Betalist. People were talking about us on twitter, someone had made our profile page on Crunchbase, all, without my knowledge.
But where did the funding come from?
To be honest, the funding is small,not even to be qualified as seed investment. The amount is equivalent to what a media / publishing project would raise on a crowdfunding site. But it’s enough to carry forward Brevity in a more polished and formal manner. I am incubated at an amazing incubator and trying to raise funding for my news app, but it’s hard to raise funding for a product not yet launched. Thanks to Betalist and hundreds of amazing users, we have finally raised some money for Brevity and are working hard to turn into something amazing.
Thank you Betalist.
Thank you indeed.
