What it takes to raise $5.5M from nothing

In this Business Canvas documentary, co-founders Woojin Kim and Brian Shin, alongside head of business Clint Yoo, retrace the run-up to a $5.5M raise that started with zero product. There's a mom-test principle for cutting through polite user feedback, a $100 lifetime-access pass that sold out on Product Hunt in three hours, and the honey-badger work ethic a teammate says put every other ambition he'd ever had in perspective. And an investor who says he decided to fund Kim on the spot, in the middle of the pitch.

Woojin Kim (Business Canvas, co-founder): My name is Woojin Kim. I'm the CEO at Business Canvas. Typed is a software that facilitates the entire process from resource collection all the way to knowledge management to document writing. We try to dramatically reduce the time spent looking for files and managing folders, so that people can focus only on document writing, utilizing all the pieces of knowledge effectively. We try to become a better version of Google Docs, Slides, even Google Drive. We were founded in 2020. We've raised US$7 million. The most recent round was US$5 million. 

Woojin: I'm not really proud of my young days. I dropped out of school when I was a high school student in South Korea. I went to a foreign language school. It's a very specific school that aims to get students into prestigious universities, so I wanted to read as many books as possible back then, but they didn't really allow it. I got a lot of stress and pressure from the university track in Korea. It's crazy there. So I dropped out of school and finally decided to go to France to become a film director.

I think life is full of unexpected events. I wanted to be a movie director. I happened to intern at a small company, a small association that helped international students find accommodations. It was kind of an offline platform. There was a Japanese founder running that association. I was an intern, but over six months I realized I'm pretty good at this, this is the thing I really love. After the internship ended, the CEO of the company offered me to take over.

I decided to run that specific company, but after a year we went bankrupt. That was the very first failure I've ever experienced in my life. Thanks to that failure, I was determined to study business management more deeply, and I finally decided to go to business school in Paris. When I first got into college I was 24, very late in many aspects. I was a latecomer indeed, but I had nothing to lose, so I was desperate, and I think that gave me an advantage compared to my peers.

I had already worked before studying, and that work experience helped me become more immersed in my studies, because I knew where this knowledge would be used later in the workplace. Accounting, for example, I really needed to absorb because I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur someday. My work experience before studying helped me a lot. After finishing my master's, I chose a stable career instead, which is why I became a consultant. But I had known for a long time, ever since I worked at that small association in Paris, that entrepreneurial blood was in my veins.

When I turned 30, I thought, it's getting too late, let's take the risk, there's nothing to lose. So I thought, all right, I'm going to quit. On the very day I found out I'd gotten a promotion. So it was a very big decision for me. Not just my parents, a lot of my friends too, told me I wasn't good enough, wasn't intelligent enough, that starting a company like that was just for special people.

I thought to myself, before ever giving it a try, I'll never know my own potential. When I decided to start up, I actually hadn't told my friends, because I was so ashamed, I thought it would fail, to be really honest. But yeah, it turned into a longer story than I expected.

Brian Shin (Business Canvas, co-founder): My name is Brian, co-founder and head of product at Typed. We're a document collaboration software that aims to serve as your team's second brain. Before co-founding Typed, I'd co-founded another company before Business Canvas. I grew up in the Philippines, and I saw many single mothers, teenage mothers, unable to receive an education, and so unable to find the jobs they needed to take care of their families and themselves.

Levelster was a company that aimed to solve that problem, the vicious cycle of a lack of education and a lack of work that these single mothers were facing. The beginning was very light. Building out our ideas, writing the business plan, it all seemed unreal, because it just seemed like another project, basically homework. Once we started pitching it, talking to customers, talking to investors, and they started saying, okay, I'll invest this amount of money, go build it, that's when I realized, wow, I actually need to build something.

I like to say this a lot: if I want to fix one person's disease, I can probably do my best to study and become a doctor. But there are so many smarter people who can be doctors. So I believe it's smarter for me to build a clinic or a hospital, an environment where those smarter doctors can come in and make that process much better than I could alone. That's when I realized this is the fastest way I can make a positive impact in this changing world.

Clint Yoo (Business Canvas, Head of Business): I came to the US when I was very young. My only goal was to study hard, get good grades, and get to the next place. I went to Phillips Academy Andover, which at the time was ranked the top prep school, and I just tried to study as hard as I could to get to the next place, which was university. Fortunately I got into Yale, and when I got there it was the same thing. All throughout that time, I never really thought about what I wanted to do.

Woojin: After deciding to quit my consulting firm, I joined a very small early-stage startup as CSO. I hired a lot of good talent, and I tried to convince them, I'm going to start this new company, I have a really great idea. But rather than trying to sell them on the product or the business vision, I tried to talk to them genuinely about life vision.

I told them, through this journey I want to achieve this life, I want to have this life, what about you? I asked them one by one, trying to really understand what they truly desired, in their shoes, not necessarily the product. I just talked to them one by one: all right, this journey might help you get what you want.

Brian: There were so many lessons I took from my first company. From founding it to the end of that journey was around one year. We had a solid business, a solid product, and our fundraising was going well, but eventually our co-founding members had a very different vision for the product. I was personally hooked on the vision we were solving, while my other teammates were more focused on the business side.

There's no right or wrong there, but the most important lesson I learned from my first company is that before product, before business, it's the team that needs to be solid. It's a team that needs to trust each other no matter what happens.

So when Woojin first brought up this new venture, he said, Brian, I have this idea about solving the problem of business plans. He wanted to build a product that helps people write better business plans and pitch decks. I agreed with the vision and the problem we wanted to solve, but it was more about how much I trusted Woojin, how much I trusted all the co-founding members. When I asked myself, could I work with these people for the next 10 or 20 years, the answer was a definitive yes.

Woojin: A lot of entrepreneurs think they need a solid product, or even MVP metrics, to fundraise initially, but that's not true. In my case, I didn't have any product, not even an MVP prototype, anything. I only had a pitch deck, and it was 120 pages long. I think that long pitch deck was able to show how desperate, how serious, our team was about this business model.

Brian: For the first six months we had no product, but I don't think that's a problem. A startup is a problem-solving organization, not a product-making organization, not a business-making organization. That comes later. The first step is to verify whether the problem you found is real. Even before founding the company, and all the way to building the product today, we talk to users a lot. There's a test we call the mom test. If you bring your product to your mom, she'll basically say it's good no matter what.

Our first principle is to never ask leading questions. If we ask, are you having a hard time writing a business plan, they'll say yes, that's an obvious answer. So really breaking that down to first principles is the first step. When we ask, do you have a hard time writing a business plan, they'll probably say yes. Why? Because I don't know where to start, I don't know how to find the right numbers. And we ask, why is it hard to find the numbers? Because there aren't enough channels or enough data for this specific industry.

Why is that? Because when I do research, I don't know which sources are trustworthy. Why is that? Because I have nowhere to verify them. Once you keep going down that why loop, you find the fundamental reason something is hard to achieve, and why it's fundamentally a problem, especially when users are facing it.

Woojin: I vividly remember my very first investor meeting. Five minutes into the pitch, he just stopped me and said, all right, I'm going to invest, who else are you talking to, investors? I'm talking to this guy and that guy, I told him. All right, drop all those deals, he said, I'm making a decision right now, I'm confirming it. I was so surprised, and later I asked him, why did you make that decision so hastily?

He said, I read your pitch deck beforehand. Your company was only founded three weeks ago, and you've already made a 120-page pitch deck. I think that's what worked.

After those first six months we started running out of money. We didn't have any product, still no prototype. We quickly launched a very simple version of the prototype, but then investors would ask, all right, there's no metrics, no evidence this product will actually work. So we came up with an idea: without a tangible product, how do we prove this product will be successful? We decided to launch on Product Hunt, kind of a Billboard chart for software. Luckily, we became the product of the day, with users coming from over 20 countries.

We leveraged that traffic and launched a lifetime pass for $100, pretty expensive, limited to only 100 tickets, and it sold out in three hours. Even investors were completely convinced before we'd launched the actual product. It made a splash in the market, and that way, without any prototype, we were able to raise $2 million.

Clint: I think a lot of people mistake IR for one big meeting that either gives you the money or doesn't. It's really investor relations almost from the start, how do you build the relationship with the investor you want money from. I think for us to be invested in by Kakao, Woojin would probably say it took a year, but our first meeting to actual investment took about three months. The reason I say it probably took a year for Woojin is that when he first met the investor, he was told he'd get the next investment from Kakao Ventures.

But by the time we opened that round, he'd already been sending KakaoTalk, which is sort of like WhatsApp in Korea, messages to the CEO of Kakao Ventures almost every day. So for him it's probably closer to a year, because he'd been telling them about every little bit of progress we were making. By the time we opened the round to VCs, they already knew a lot about us, because Woojin had been sending them updates for about six months.

Woojin: Now we have to scale up. The product became pretty stable, and we're experiencing stable, exponential growth. The thing is, we need more resources, and hiring more people with enough money is easy. But maintaining our own culture is such a pain. It comes down to retention again, just like with SaaS products. So I try to satisfy the current employees, current team members, in many ways, but the main focus is always growth. Basically, the people who are attracted to startups, it's all about the growth.

Clint: There was a documentary about honey badgers. Honey badgers don't give a damn, they just do what they want to do. They'll eat a snake, and even though the snake's poison knocks them out, they'll wake up hours later and eat that snake again. If it wants honey, it doesn't care that there are hundreds of bees stinging it, which probably hurts. It'll just go and eat it. We're sort of similar. If we see something, we'll just go for it. There are a lot of crazy people here.

Taewoong Seo (PM): It's almost like a school club, or a small community at a college. It doesn't feel like a strict, hierarchical company, but I think we're able to move together toward one direction pretty quickly. The second thing, which sort of follows from the first, is that Andy (Woojin) and the team try to give a lot of opportunities for literally everyone to have a say, have an opinion, and actually execute on that opinion. For example, I joined as an intern last year.

We were talking about how there was a need to build a mobile app for Typed, and it was just an idea. I wanted to build on that idea, but at the time I didn't know much about what product management was, or much about the product itself yet. The team set the environment for me to actually go and execute the mobile product, so I owned the whole product development cycle for Typed Mobile and was able to ship it to customers. Even as an intern who didn't know much about product management, I think that says a lot about the team culture.

Brian: I think number one, Typed's culture is to be radically transparent, very communicative about whatever is happening. Even if something's going bad, even if something's failing, all the more you should be transparent so the team can help you solve that issue. Number two is mutual respect. And number three is a lighter one: to have fun.

Woojin: I went to school for the first time at 25, and I was able to get into a pretty good graduate school because I worked really hard, not because I was smart or anything like that. So the only message I want to give is this: when I was a student, and I looked at a lot of successful entrepreneurs, I thought they were just a different type of person, from the beginning. That was my thought.

But I want to tell you, our company is not yet successful, but we're doing great, and if you think I'm a different type of person, no, I'm not. I was lagging behind in every single aspect. So I just want to tell you, if I was able to do this, for you it'll probably be a piece of cake.

Clint: During my studies here in the US, I've met some of the most brilliant people, probably in the world, people who will probably go on to win Nobel Prizes. But when I met Woojin and started working with him, I thought I was sort of smart, and I thought I was obsessive, because I always wanted to work hard, and I thought I did. Seeing him work changed all of that. I felt like, wow, I really didn't try that hard in life, I wasn't desperate enough. That's how he makes you feel, not through his intentions, just by being with him and working with him.

He'll always be the last person to leave the office. Sometimes I'd be so focused on whatever project I was working on that I'd spend from maybe 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. with headphones on, just working. When I'm finished, my assumption is that no one's going to be at the office anymore, because it's 2 a.m., but when I take my headphones off, it's none other than Woojin who comes over to me and starts talking about this idea.

Minwoo Cho (Data PM): When I listened to Woojin and the other co-founders explain what product we were trying to build, and what impact we wanted to give the world, we were trying to connect all kinds of different information and different types of knowledge together. I realized that through this we'd be able to build a knowledge network.

I was actually studying neurons at the time, and I was quite interested in neuroscience as well, and I realized the product we were trying to build was very similar to the way the human brain works. Our white paper actually talks about how the brain finds patterns, and just like the brain finds patterns, Typed tries to find patterns between different pieces of information. I think that's how the project actually started.

Woojin: We have users coming from over 150 countries, 30,000 users around the world. For us, a document is a container of knowledge. When it comes to creating knowledge, you constantly have to reference a lot of different types of digital knowledge, so you can collect a variety of references, whether it's PDF, Excel, or Word, and refer to all those different file formats directly while writing a document. That's, I think, the biggest difference from our competitors.

Brian: I believe I'm a very big beneficiary of technology, especially the internet. The internet was able to decentralize knowledge in a way that gave me the opportunity to consume any type of information I wanted, anytime, which I believe is immensely valuable. Because I benefited so greatly from this, I want to amplify it even more. Equal opportunity can't just happen, but opportunity for equality is something that can be achieved through providing more opportunity through technology.

The reason I founded my previous company, why I founded Typed, and the other companies I'll probably build throughout my life, is aligned with my life's vision of building more opportunities for people to achieve equality. Right now, I'm more focused on the information and knowledge side of that opportunity, because I think people should be able to learn and use whatever knowledge and information they need to achieve something.

The happiest moment for me, especially while building the product, is when a customer tells us, oh, I'm writing my new business plan with Typed, I'm writing my new research paper with Typed. It's because we're building that basis for other people to realize their dreams on. Making that impact is something that makes me really happy, and it's basically a lifelong mission for me.