Tamzin Lovell-Miller is the founder of ArtFundi, which provides a SaaS solution for art gallery owners and artists who sell their own work.
She owned two galleries and the logistics of online showing were problematic. Lots of retyping. Lots of tools not built to accommodate the size and resolution required. Lots of hassles. Lots of lost time. She built software to solve those problems and shared (well actually sold) it with the world. For that, we will credit her with her first point of #SuckageReduction.
But her second point of #SuckageReduction is even more significant. In the fine art world, there is a very particular style and form in which correspondence and documentation are done. People who do not know to use (or how to use) are seen as outsiders and put at a significant disadvantage as a result.
Photo by Pavel Pjatakov on UnsplashHer software helps assure that such materials are put perfectly in the expected manner. This can shave years off the journey to be accepted for a new artist or gallery.
Despite her software is spreading #SuckageReduction around the world, and being in many ways a model to follow, that is not what brought her to us here today.
Today she’s here to share a few experiences and insights for her successful first round of fundraising. She attended a boot camp that was dedicated to the fundraising process.
They told her to expect to give 100 pitches along the path to funding. The good news is that it only took her 60. The better news is because of that expectation setting she didn’t get discouraged and give up at 25. Realistic expectations allow us to better navigate the world.
Second, she learned to (in her words), “think like an investor.” Understanding the business and success-focused metrics not only let her better structure her pitches, the help her to make her business itself better. This is easy for me to believe, but not something that I had ever considered.
Finally, her first two investors were people she knew, but did not know were investors. By her starting to talk about her business in an investor-friendly way, they developed an interest and asked about investing without her ever asking them.
Who do you know that you don’t know is a potential investor in your startup?
