Premoney 19: Virtual Attention & Pick My Brain
New Year...new companies: Dropshipping & knowledge dropping worldwide.
Welcome to 2021….and week 19 of Premoney! If there was any silver lining from 2020, it was being able to focus some time & attention on this newsletter, meeting the featured founders, and helping to bridge the gap between founder and investors.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and haven’t signed up yet - sign up below. If you have a friend, colleague, or know a founder/investor who’d love what we’re doing. Please share and help us on our mission!
Vision & launch on Product Hunt on Thursday.
The vision of Premoney.xyz is to be a mini-marketplace that connects founders to investors, and breaks down the venture barrier to early & first-time founders.
The Premoney List newsletter is the first step towards that mission. Below are the steps I’ll be taking…please provide your feedback - would love to incorporate it.
Step 1: Newsletter
Status: In progress
Purpose: Built the right audience, validate need & introduction process.
Step 2: Website
Status: Found here & launching on Product Hunt this Thursday.
Purpose: A precursor to a marketplace. Enables non-newsletter growth & ability to test other products.
Step 3: Marketplace
Status: Coming Q2 2021
Purpose: A more tangible and persistent way for founders to connect with investors, for investors to identify early opportunities, and as a precursor to providing investment to featured founders.
Step 4: A rolling fund
Status: Tentatively Q1 2022
Purpose: A way that I can further support founders. I’ll partner with investors in this network to provide certain founders with early-capital to keep growing.
All that being said…I’ll be launching Premoney.xyz on Product Hunt on Thursday, and would love your support. Be on the lookout for a quick note from me on Thursday to help support the launch :-)
On to this weeks list!
Below you’ll find two companies below who recently launched, are actively raising (or both) with a bit more detail.
If you’re interested in connecting with them, please use the form I linked to and let me know which company you’re interested in chatting with and we’ll get you introduced!
This weeks companies:
Virtual Attention
Company: Virtual Attention
Founder: Brandon McGill
Stage: Pre-seed, raising $750K
Vertical: Ecommerce
Business Model: B2B
1-liner: Virtual Attention is a Shopify app aggregator, providing an auto-pilot solution for dropshippers on a single platform.
Description: Dropshippers have an extremely difficult time mastering & managing 10+ apps outside of their skillset to successfully run their business. The Virtual Attention platform is an app aggregator that makes it extremely easy for dropshippers to run their business on autopilot. We have an unfair advantage with customer acquisition due to partnerships with fulfillment centers and our biggest partnership with HyperSKU, who has a mailing list of 30,000 drop-shippers.
Traction:
Profitable & super high margin
50%+ MoM growth in Q4 📈
Pick My Brain
Company: Pick My Brain
Founder: Maxine May Cunningahm
Stage: Pre-seed, raising $1M
Vertical: SaaS, Marketplace
Business Model: SaaS, Revenue Share, Fee-Based
1-liner: Where people go to buy, sell and share knowledge in real-time.
Description: There are a whole lot of smart and interesting people who want to share their knowledge with others but they don't know how to do it, and they don't know how to get paid for it. Enter Pick My Brain. The world's first online knowledge marketplace and tool that helps you package and price your brain.
We predict knowledge commerce > e-commerce in 5 years. And we also think there is an Amazon size marketplace for something as simple as real-time conversations with smart people about smart things.
Traction:
500 bookings per month
$5000 MRR (soon to be $20k with B2B deals)
100% MoM growth 😱
Know a founder? Let’s get them featured.
If you know a founder that is raising or thinking about their growth strategy, have them sign up here: www.premoney.xyz and get them in front of our investor base :-)
That’s all for today! Welcome back!