Opening Up About The Challenges In 2021 And Our Path for 2022
2021 was a tough year - today, with the pandemic slowing down and life returning to normal, we have perhaps forgotten how hard the year was when Wave 2 struck. At LetsVenture, we were in a sensitive spot. On the one hand, investors were grappling with the impact on their own families and not inclined to focus on investing. On the other hand, founders were grappling with fundraising to keep the business growing. We were between two sides that seemed contradictory.
Fast forward to December 2021 - most of our team gave up their year-end break as we were busy working on our new platform launch.
Since then, thanks to various factors that have created tailwinds for investors in private markets, we have seen numbers jump 4x on the LetsVenture platform in just a couple of months. These factors include:
These have been significant drivers, and we are seeing a return to investing with a vengeance.?
These new dynamics are good for us, but as the founder, I have to admit publicly here that we were unprepared for this scale-up. Although my team has been working over 14 hrs a day, fired up on all fronts - hiring, new team member induction, setting up the processes for scale; we have probably failed at managing customer expectations.?
While we celebrate our numbers and growth, there have been escalations and complaints on social media. Those are being addressed on priority. However, I write this for people who did not slam us but feel dissatisfied with this turn of events.?
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?We hear you. As the founder, I take accountability for the misses in execution. I can’t thank my team enough for stepping up, but I probably did not expand the team quickly enough to keep the experience seamless for investors. That is why the third wave caught us unprepared, impacting 80% of my team. Our organization was working at 50% capacity, and we did not foresee this.
We could have done things better by giving our customers a realistic timeline of responding and delivering on discussed outcomes. We should have reset expectations with founders on their fundraising efforts. We will implement processes to improve on these things.?
First, we are setting up a customer support team on priority. We’ll share more details about this soon. Second, we are revamping our processes for better execution. Third, we are expanding the team to create a greater capacity for our scale-up.
In hindsight, I believe that investors understand if we set the right expectations, and founders are also patient if they know the correct timelines. But, for reasons difficult to explain now without sounding like excuses, we lagged on things.?
Just as I get all the congratulations when things go well, I will take accountability this time. We are working hard to ensure we address all this on priority - in the meanwhile, if you have issues to resolve, please write to me at [email protected]. As always, I will try and respond as soon as possible.?
We have been fortunate to get the ecosystem’s support so far. We look forward to playing our role in making early-stage investing easy, transparent, and accessible to founders and investors. Let's continue to venture into new milestones “Together”.