Ask your VCs/angels for help, this is the kind of thing they can definitely help with.
(Speaking from experience - one of our portfolio companies had a similar challenge and we used our network to get to one of the execs of the vendor involved)
Do you think the markets for art prints or sports cards are also scams?
Collectable markets behave fundamentally differently from utility good markets so it's often hard to reason about them when you try to apply logic from one type of market to another.
Crunchbase is a (relatively) cheap product for this kind of research.
I'd suggest talking to other vc-funded fintech founders who've raised at your stage in the last couple of years, especially for products that sit in parallel spaces to yours. They'll know who the relevant fintech investors are because they'll have spoken to many of them.
Thanks ig1. I was initially looking into crunchbase but upon further research, it seemed like Pitchbook was a lot more accurate. Do you have an opinion on Crunchbase? Is it that bad, or just not as good as pitchbook but worth it still?
If they're in a financial position to do so, have them angel invest in the startup. In general my experience has been expert angels add a lot more value than advisors.
Blossom is one of Europe's leading Series A VC firms, and technology is a core part of how we operate, from how we source startups to invest in to how we run due-diligence.
We're looking for a commercial-savvy full-stack engineer to help us build out our internal technology tools. You'll be a core part of the investment team and help us find the next generation of break-out startups.
It'll probably be the best fit for someone with a couple of years of experience (ideally at a fast growing startup), but we're happy to consider fresh graduates if you've had [internships|side projects|open source contributions].
(onsite in London, but we can also help with visas, etc. if you're looking to relocate)
If you're interested drop me a note at imran@blossomcap.com
1) There’s customers who will pay 15k for the exact same users/features as you’re willing to pay <3k for. If they offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn’t pay for the expensive package.
2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they’re often as expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc) but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a company decides where to focus it’s going to go where the money is.
I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs.
I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem.
One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.
The challenge is that there aren't really any good alternatives.
The alternatives suggested (Plausible, Fathom, etc.) are fine for hobby projects, blogs, etc. but they don't support any of the modern analytics required for commercial usage.
If you're running a business then you need an analytics solution that supports attribution modelling, cohorts, funnels, etc. and there's just no great competitors.
I'm the co-founder of https://pirsch.io/. We plan to add features for marketeers, but it's hard to be privacy-friendly/GDPR compliant and support that at the same time. We can talk about it if you like, just drop me an email: marvin.blum@emvi.com
