Cheers reposted this
Here is a slide from our Q1 2020 investor pitch deck. Little did we know that COVID would shut the world down in mid-march. We never ended up closing a round—but we did produce $1.8m in profit that year! It was a scary few months. In April, the data looked so bad I thought the company was dead. To make matters worse, Shelby and I personally guaranteed a $730k SBA loan to the company... so if the company went under, it would wreck us personally too. However, with people at home and spending all days on their phones and big companies slashing their media budgets, ad costs dropped on social media and we went aggressive. That summer we had days where we were generating $25k in profit a day! 🤯 We quickly paid back the $730k loan to get that stress off our backs. Of course, when Apple rolled out iOS 14.5 in early 2021 which killed the efficiency of digital advertising, those good days came to a grinding halt and put us back into a winter. Now in 2024 we're finding our stride again and are up 100% YoY. 📈 In hindsight, we are lucky we never got the Series A round to go through. It taught us some really important muscles around how to find cash from WITHIN a business. People got laid off, vendors terminated, etc. It wasn't easy, but we got through it. Houston's main resident billionaire is Tilman Fertitta—he owns restaurants, casinos, and the Rockets. I heard him speak at a book event not too long before COVID and he talked about a few times when he almost went bankrupt. He said: "You always have more breaths in business than you think." Those words really stuck with me... and will for the rest of my life.