Over the last few months, the whole ‘winter is coming’ clamor in the VC space globally has only grown louder. We’re not worried about ‘winter’ – we’re growing a tough, hardy evergreen, not a hot-house orchid. 

The frenzy of last year, especially the insanity by the end of the year, made it clear to anyone who understands the flow of money globally + the VC space that this bubble had to burst soon. As founders raising a pre-seed round, we knew we had to design a company and a fundraising strategy that took that into consideration. Hence our ‘surprisingly low’ valuation at a time when others were raised at seriously high vals. This is also why we resisted the push to increase our round size (and saying no, thank you, to money was tough) and to simply keep on increasing our val cap. 

This has resulted in us being extremely well placed to now raise a follow-on round when we feel it’s the right time, and to still be able to offer a fantastic deal to investors that come in at seed. We are not worried about the liquidity crunch – cash looks for yield, and we will remain a fantastic company offering excellent returns because of how we’re positioned. The fact that we have decent in-bound interest from funds even now, speaks to this. Our waiting list of businesses has increased by 159% since we last spoke (still without any marketing $ spent).

We have put into place internal milestones for the next 6 months which are more aggressive than the projections we shared at pre-seed. This is because now that the app is in better shape, and we have started shipping + getting great feedback from users, we believe we can aim higher. All our focus right now is on finding product-market fit, and drilling deeper into our customer personas. We are also introducing a version of our product in between the paid and the 15K (PKR) version, which we will talk about in more detail next month, but have high hopes from. The framework for the tax features, which aim to increase stickiness, have also been completed. 

The VC market is going to get tough, but we are not going into it blind. And as anyone who knows Omar and I well would know – we f*ing love competition.  

– Meenah