As a five-time VC-backed founder, Salesfolks CEO Lief Larson knows the traditional fundraising game. He also knows how that game can pull an entrepreneur’s focus and energy away from the thing that really matters: building a strong company from scratch.
“Every entrepreneur who’s done it can tell you how much of a pain the roadshow is — it’s time taken away from your product, your customers, your revenue. Fairmint has fundamentally changed that, letting you maintain your focus on growing the business.”
Maintaining that focus is critical because nothing’s a given when launching a startup. Teams have to build everything from the product itself to the process for collecting payments.
Even as a company moves closer to product-market fit, not everyone will buy from a budding company, no matter how much they need the product. Part of the early-stage entrepreneur’s job is finding people who are willing to take a risk.
“At the beginning [of a startup], it’s not even about finding the early adopters. You need the “early innovators” — people willing to stick their neck out because they believe in the thesis of what you’re building.”
Lief’s comfortable in seeking out those early innovators because he’s one of them — which explains why he was one of the first customers to sign up for Fairmint.
“I’m always looking for new ways to grow a business. As an early innovator, I got behind Fairmint very quickly. I loved the mission. I thought the idea of programmable equity just made a ton of sense, the ability to open it up to a broader community.”
Inspired by Aaron Shapiro’s Users, Not Customers, Lief was looking for a way to build his product community and create more sustainable customer relationships. The way startups have always been built meant that long-term alignment between users, the company, and its investors couldn’t exist. As with Uber or Airbnb, many “community-based” businesses didn’t include the community in their long-term financial success, as the community could never access company equity.
With Fairmint, founders can align their community for the long-term.
Once the decision to use community ownership was made, spinning up the Salesfolks investor portal was simple. Since Fairmint’s SaaS model takes founders through the process step-by-step, lighting up an offering is a straightforward process.
“We were able to easily work with our counsel and get the documents ready to quickly get our investment portal running and customized. It’s our brand leading things, with Fairmint’s plumbing handling the backend.”
The result has been a balanced mix of investors, coming from both inbound and outbound channels. Salesfolks has an investment link in their site footer, and the team includes an investment button featuring the $SALES ticker in their email signatures. For the moment, about half of their investors come from their growing user community and half from angels & other professional investors.
One feature of the Rolling SAFE that their investors appreciate is the ability to de-risk their investment by injecting capital incrementally. This is facilitated by regular investor reports that demonstrate the company’s progress.
“There’s one investor in particular. They’ve invested 3 times, and I know they’re going to put in a 4th. Investors get proof of how well we’re executing, see that their money is being well-utilized. That adds confidence and encourages follow-on investments.”
With an always-up-to-date Rolling SAFE table, valuation, and token price, Salesfolks investors enjoy a level of transparency beyond the traditional world of convertible notes and priced rounds. And with the Fairmint investor portal, potential investors can easily receive information and, if they so choose, make their investment.
“We’re able to use the Fairmint platform to educate our potential investors, take them through the verification process, have them commit capital, and now they’re listed in our programmable equity table. All the boxes of what’s needed to fulfill the vision of community ownership, they’re all checked.”
Lief sees Fairmint as bringing forward a new era in entrepreneurship. Whether the goal is to build the next sexy unicorn or a solid, nose-to-the-grindstone business, rolling fundraising gives founders a new way to capitalize their growing companies.
“How do you open up fundraising to all kinds of investors funding all kinds of potentially great companies? The Fairmint model is excellent for that. You can go from the back of a napkin to launch to growth to M&A or an IPO, all within Fairmint’s system of rolling fundraising.”
At Salesfolks, they see the potential coming in through their chatbots. Whether through their Fairmint portal or the Salesfolks website, they get inbound interest from people who love the idea of being able to invest.
Lief can see the day coming when that momentum of community ownership will fuel a powerful feedback loop that leads to a whole new era of growth at the company.
“People reach out and say, ‘This is super, the ability to be an owner, to have more of an impact on what the platform becomes.’ They’ve never had that kind of access to a startup before. And that sense of community-owned pride will turn them into salesfolks — no pun intended — for our platform.”
