Leonhard Widrich and Joel Gascoigne were classmates at England's University of Warwick. The pair founded a startup together called Buffer, that helps you share Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates more intelligently.
Seven weeks later, Buffer started generating revenue. Widrich dropped out of school and Gascoigne left his full-time job to grow their company. After two years of bootstrapping and growing the userbase to 55,000 accounts, the pair booked a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
They created a 13-slide pitch. Three months later, they rounded up $500,000 from 18 angel investors including HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah, Mightytext co-founder Maneesh Arora, and AngelList's Graham Jenkin.
For two first-time founders, three months to raise a round sounds quick. But Widrich says he and Gascoigne spoke with over 200 potential investors during that time frame and had more than 50 meetings to finally find the 18 people who said "yes."
"We learned you have to do a lot of meetings to actually get investment," Widrich says. "Hearing 'no' up to 10 times a day was definitely one of the toughest things."
Today, Buffer is generating over $1 million in annual revenue with over 650,000 users.
What did the winning pitch look like? Widrich shared the 13 slides with Business Insider.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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