Sampler
A local Startup Next judge led their seed round
and made valuable introductions
–
A Startup Next Story
Founding a business can be an experience of extremes: from frantic and fast-moving one week to periods of doubt and solitude the next.
Late one Sunday night, Marie Chevrier found herself in one of those soul-searching moments alone at her Toronto startup. Even though she had a small team and a “successful startup” there was a lingering feeling that something was missing.
She wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, but felt like commiserating with others would be a start. By chance, she found Startup Next in a web search, and soon found herself among many like-minded entrepreneurs. She also found a whole lot more.
Marie Chevrier recently took some time to discuss her Startup Next Experience.
What challenges were you facing coming into Startup Next?
We already scaled the company to 19 paying clients and $120K in revenue. People had been buying from our platform, but I had no idea why and I had no idea how to scale it beyond where it was. With my business — sure I had a cool product, but are they buying because it’s targeted? Are they buying because it’s social? Are they buying because I’m nice to them? I had no idea.
What did you get out of Startup Next?
The important thing for me was every week having all of these mentors wanting and expecting me to deliver something new…some quantifiable results.
I took it so seriously and I think that that’s why I made the most out of it.
Obviously, every time I went into another investor pitch I beefed up my presentation and all of that, but Startup Next helped create the 10 most important slides of my investor deck. That was with the help of the mentors in Toronto, but also the coaching I received from their leadership team during a trip to go pitch at their Demo Day in San Francisco and NYC.
“I have a Facebook app that helps people send product samples to each other.” That’s how I defined it then, and by the end of the program it was “a social sampling management and analytics platform.”
I could see I had a business model for the first time, and not just a lifestyle business.
Was Startup Next a factor in fundraising for Sampler?
One thing I think is incredibly notable about the program is that the lead investor in my early round, the lady that like basically made it all happen as far as introductions to other investors, was sitting on the judging panel on the last night of our local Next program.
So for us, it (Startup Next introductions) started feeding some conversations for a Series A round, and those conversations are starting to help me think through what milestones I need to hit in the next year to get there.
What advice would you give a founder or team looking at Next?
I think Next helps you gather perspective from people from many different walks of life and business. You’ve got a customer development expert, you’ve got guy who sold his company a couple of times, like you’ve got all the resources that you need for all the questions you have and it really feels like a 360-degree panel.
And just yesterday, the organizers in Toronto…invited me back for a three hour session where we just talked about products and stuff like that that, the same way we used to during the Next program. And by the end of it, I was like, “damn, I just wish I could it again,” because I don’t think that need ever stops, right? To have this 360-degree perspective. An informed outsider perspective…
If you could do Startup Next all over again, would you change anything?No. I took the Next experience all in.
I’m one of the lucky teams that realized early on
that this is an important process and I think
I’ve been rewarded over and over again for fully embracing it.
Want to create your own
success story with Startup Next?
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