Respawn Ventures: Giving Bootstrapped Founders a Way Out
Good news! we’re setting up a venture building company. But what is a venture builder you ask? Well it can also be known as a tech studio, startup factory or foundry (among other names), these companies are revolutionising the startup model.
In partnership with entrepreneurs, VBs quickly and efficiently co-found and get new enterprises off the ground by leveraging knowledge and resources that are shared among their ventures. When you hear of venture builders, have in mind a few core activities that are common to most of them:
Conceiving business ideas — this is usually done either as the result of in-depth concept exploration and market research or by replicating existing models in creative ways. Regardless, the intent is to develop viable (and usually scalable) businesses. It’s also important to remember that the proactivity a VB has in the conception of its ventures is directly related to its degree of participation as a shareholder in the companies it builds.
Building teams — daring projects are only possible by means of talented execution. By concentrating highly skilled talents of diverse backgrounds in-house, VBs can quickly assemble multi-disciplinary teams with the expertise of seasoned professionals whenever a new venture is launched.
Business management — venture builders have a wide range of operational and strategic involvement in the companies they co-found, engaging in activities such as market research, team structuring, product development, financial and legal support, fundraising and various other affairs. Ultimately, they are involved in all aspects of their endeavors on a day-to-day basis.
Providing shared resources — venture builders leverage shared assets among their companies, including knowledge, methodologies and services such as Finance, HR and Legal. This results in reduced operational costs as the result of a collaborative ecosystem of “parallel entrepreneurship”, in which lessons learned are shared and the cost of growth and scalability is distributed among the VB’s many ventures.
Our model is a little different however. With Respawn Ventures we won’t be building the portfolio from scratch, we’ll be acquiring bootstrapped projects from indie makers that haven’t seen huge sparks of growth but have the underlying tech built and validated their offering with a minimum viable product.
So why are we starting Respawn?
Well, what sparked this ended up being a single tweet:
We’ve been following Jon for a while and we got curious when he started his 12 startups in 12 months project. He’s a talented developer with an eye for business opportunity and as soon as we saw the tweet we engaged in acquisition talks. Chris had previously used Promomatic multiple times for client projects and saw huge potential in the automated design space. We struck a deal to purchase two of his products from the challenge.
So what did we acquire?
Promomatic is an app store design platform that helps developers quickly automate their app screenshots. This is something Chris had been using with a client prior to Jon’s announcement and so we had a good understanding of the product’s potential. There are a few competitors in this space but we felt like there was sufficient room to grow a subscription model and evolve it into a larger offering, strategic integrations with app store optimisation products and to also expand the builder to allow design assets for other promotional.
Montage: is a rapid app prototyping platform with a user-generated library of components. We both have an affinity for Sketch/XD/Marvel/Figma products, we both love prototyping with a potentially new product offerings. However most of those applications are heavy (you need to download them and aren’t so easy for the novice user). Montage allows anyone the ability to take pre-existing app/website components and remix it into a new product, all within the browser.
How is Respawn Ventures different to other venture builders?
Unlike other VBs we’re not starting from zero, we want to find founders who’ve already taken the first few steps building their product and bootstrapping it to an MVP. We’re looking for ‘Products that re-enter play after being killed’, and what we mean by this is that the founder has not (for one reason or another) had time to allocate to fully building out their proposition to a fully-fledged-revenue-generating-machine. Our secret sauce is then taking that new born product, understanding the market dynamics and giving it a few product/business tweaks which will allow it to flourish.
