This is an anonymous post from an Elpha member.

[Covid19 and fundraising] Should we wait to fundraise or release our product?

anonymous·Mar 15, 2020

Our startup is making a b2b SaaS product. The business clients, however, are in an industry that is impacted by isolation protocols. If people don't leave their houses, our software clients won't be using our software because they'll be out of work. Since Covid19 isn't expected to keep people in isolation long-term, just for a few or perhaps several months in the worst case, is it best to delay rolling out our product or pitching until after things return to normalcy? Or should we just go on as originally planned to start fundraising in April and onboarding our initial test users in the meantime?

Ana·Mar 16, 2020

Not being in the office doesn’t mean people won’t work from home! That’s a dangerous assumption. My suggestion is to try to fundraise, look at extending current runway and thinking through the sales cycle if it prolongs to q3. Why not soft launch the product now, get the data points and fully launch in a few months?The fed already cut rates very very low, if markets don’t respond positively tomorrow, safe to say is we’re recession-bound. Keep the raise and relationships going, schedule those online investor calls.

anonymous·Mar 17, 2020

thanks, Ana-Maria! This is great. I should have made my original post more clear though. Our software user are currently actually out of work available to do, not merely physically out of office like most other white collar workers. Most of them are not currently collecting payments from their own customers, not getting new customers, and are having to refund existing customers right now because they deliver an partially in-person service to their customers and the in-person component cannot be moved offline. As soon as people resume their normal social activities, their activity levels should bounce back. Although we could theoretically sign users up, they wouldn't be active on the app until after their clients start needing the services again (post social distancing). Although we're eager to raise funding before a recession makes it harder to raise, we are also conscious that if we onboard users right now, those early test-phase data points are going to unnecessarily abysmal due to the temporary lack of activity in the industry we are targeting right now. Does this change your advice? Is it worse to pitch now with bad data and low activity levels, or postpone pitching until our activity levels will be a better representation of what we might expect?