Your 2018 Guide on How To Do It Successfully
Thank you to Parul Sign who has provided a great guide. Access the guide here.
Parul walks through some great questions to ask yourself and your partners such as:
- Realistically, are you venture scale?
- How competitive are you?
- Are you willing to optimize for investor fit?
As an Emerge subscriber, we strive to serve you and your team by saving you time and money by connecting you with the knowledge, mentors and resources you need at each stage as you grow your shelf space. Creating a great new product with just the right packaging is vital to building a winning brand, but it is only the first step. Gaining the financial acumen to grow and sustain a successful business is equally important.
In recent conversations with FMI Emerge Mentors Randy Funk of Frontera Equity and Keith Kohler of the K2 Group, we learned some finance basics.
Randy and Keith both have extensive financing experience and expertise that they are ready to share with the community.
Randy shared his insights on four future failure indicators for many new entrepreneurs:
- A product that doesn’t solve a problem for a very specific demographic;
- Moving too slowly and in too many directions without a clear vision of the target consumer;
- Lack of awareness that a window of opportunity may be closing faster than you know; and
- Seeking confirmation for what you already think rather than asking for help from those who know more than you do.
Keith shared with us from some finance terms that you can’t avoid as an emerging brand.
You need a strong working knowledge of “A” round financing, “B” round, cost of capital, convertible notes and all types of debt financing. If these terms and processes sound like a foreign language to you, you’re not alone.
“Food and beverage tends to have a lot of people who go into business very focused on their products,” said Keith Kohler, president of The K2 Group, “but without a lot of financial knowledge.”
In an industry as competitive as food retail, it’s imperative that you equip yourself with the tools you’ll need to make your emerging brand successful. If you don’t know what some of these terms mean, it’s time to learn
them, and to understand how much more there is to the financial side of bringing a new product to the marketplace.
Emerge also provides you with access to curated third-party content that can help you dig even deeper into topics you need to know about. Check out this blog post on how convertible notes work.
Here are a few other excellent articles on raising a seed round:
- How to Raise Seed Stage Funding: The Startup Guide by Justin Kan
- How raising a $2+M Seed Round really, actually went by Emily Cavanaugh
- How to Raise Seed Capital: Crucial Steps to Know by Rob Go
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