The fundraising process of often about creating leverage over investors. Companies need to think about raising VC rounds (and large angel rounds) as a reward for creating a growing product in a multi-billion dollar market. Also many companies screw up fundraising by running the process in serial vs in parallel.

Here is a mini guide for a 2 minute pitch - why don't you fill it out so I can see where you are (each answer should be 1-2 sentences at most): 1) what does your company do? 2) How big is the market? 3) Describe your month over month grow? 4) What do you understand about this market that others do not? 5) How do you make money? 6) Why is your team the best team to tackle this problem 7) How much are you raising?

Thank you, that's helpful.

1) Romulus (https://romulusapp.com) is a CRM and ticketing cloud service for local governments. Think SalesForce + ZenDesk for constituent services.

2) There are 90,000 local governments, each with 10-15 departments that interface directly with constituents and need our software as it is today. ARR per customer (department) is ~$9k.

3) 50-100% MoM growth for the past 6 months. Sales is focused on penetrating new cities, then we've had great success with referrals from existing customers.

4) Building a better product isn't the hard part, since "best government software" is a super low bar. Innovation is in the business model — avoid RFPs, find one decision maker, lower CAC with growth through referrals — which means our growth engine is exactly the same as startups in other sectors.

5) Per-user recurring subscription. Right now $40/user/month, lots of room for expansion there.

6) Founders were early engineers at Gusto, so we know how to bring delightful products to unsexy problems and build a mission-driven culture. We are passionate about solving this particular problem and have worked for over a year to de-risk the business before asking for investment.

7) $2,000,000 to get to $1m ARR, at which point we raise a Series A.

P.S.

I don't think of fundraising as a reward or a goal in and of itself. It is a means for us to achieve our potential. We hold ourselves to a high bar for product and impact. If potential investors recognize that, cool, but we're not in this to be on TechCrunch.

1) You need to be more clear about what the product does - Ticketing cloud service / CRM are jargon - how would you describe it to your mother and father?

2) When sizing the market you need to either go top down or bottom up? How much money is spent by governments on this type of software per year right now or if every target government in america was using your product how much revenue would you generate?

3) 50%-100% MoM is great - whats your Mrr and are their any particularly notable towns who are customers?

4) Your unique insight is really in how to sell software to a government without long lead times / large sales teams - can you be a bit more specific about your technique here

5) Great - how many potential users are there per typical customer

6) Cool

7) $1m ARR isnt actually that high of a bar anymore when it comes to raising series A - much easier if you hit $2-$4m ARR - also that should get you to break even which makes raising an A easier

PS: Did you guys apply to YC?

1) When someone calls into a local government department (elected official, public works, utilities, parks & rec), the staff needs a centralized system to track their issue, collaborate with everyone who can help solve it, and identify important issues across the municipality.

2) Bottoms up: $3bn in ARR as our pricing stands today, (90k gov * 15 depts/gov * 5 users/dept * $480ARR/user). Our customers keep saying our pricing is cheap so we need to revisit that — 2016 goal to expand ARPU 50%. That's without building anything else, but we have numerous higher-value expansion points in mind with one starting pilot phase.

3) Notable customers in Oakland, Chicago, and Miami. Last I checked we were at ~2k MRR but we just closed a few this week so I'll have to check. (Don't worry, we have a great accountant ;)) EDIT: Just added San Antonio

4) Penetrate toughest markets first (see #3) to build reputation before moving down. Target early-adopters in those markets then leverage those relationships to expand (localgov is a tightknit community.) 2/3 local government leaders hit retirement from 2014-2018, so a new wave of tech-savvy leadership is taking the reigns.

5) Right now we are seeing 7 on average, but we think 4-5 is more typical.

7) We'd hit profitability before $1m so $2-4 is reasonable. We're a small team and CAC is pretty small. Less about the number than proving a repeatable growth engine that can turn capital into many times that capital.

Bonus) Yes, when we didn't know what the hell we were doing :) That was about a year ago. I agree we shouldn't have gotten in.

1) That is a better description - although I feel like this only describes a small set of things that a government does - is this just for constituent services? Is that a small or big part of the day to day work of a local government?

2) cool

3) cool

4) very cool

5) cool

7) Good

RE: YC - you guys should apply - email me at michael@ycombinator.com - this is a space I'm very interested in (I'm a poli sci major) and I think you have a good shot at getting into the summer batch

1) Constituent services are at the heart of every local government and the data surrounding them are its vital signs.

From an operations (top-down) perspective, constituent services tell you which departments are living up to their civic mandate. Think CSAT and NPS in SaaS companies — two metrics that predict retention and growth, that measure how you're doing and customers' faith in your future.

If, bottoms-up, you want to drive democratic decision making with real data, look at the hundreds of millions of interactions constituents have with their local government. It's only by improving the day-to-day that governments get a high-level view of what structural changes need to be made.

The product focus of Romulus is on those day-to-day users right now, but it's really the level above — the chiefs of staff, elected officials, city managers — that love the potential.

YC) Will do. As a philosophy major, I'm glad to see more liberal arts around here.