Thread by @VaibhavSisinty

I have got some news 😀

We ( GrowthSchool ↗️ ) have raised $5M in seed funding from Sequoia Capital, Owl Ventures, and 80+ Angel investors.

Here is how we got here 👇

Building a startup is hard and lonely 😖

It took me and my team 1 year to go from validating the idea to building a profitable startup to raising money.

Wanted to share everything we have experienced building @growthschoolio

💥 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗛𝗬 :

When we think of the difference between a good and a bad college there are 3 things:

1️⃣ People you learn with (Friends)
2️⃣ Who you learn from (Teachers)
3️⃣ What you learn (Curriculum)

If you come from a top college like an IIT, IIM you might get 2/3 above, what about rest 99% 😖

They barely get access to any.

To bridge this gap, I always wanted to build something in the education space

Accidentally boredom off pandemic led me to a launch LinkedIn Workshop 😅

I did that full time after moving away from @KlookTravel

LinkedIn Workshop scaled like crazy,

Did over 25K people in 6-7 months.

People loved the format,

NPS was 🚀

Which led to 1000's getting jobs, business leads and so on.

After 7-8 months of building and playbooking everything,

We decided to launch 3 more programs with other experts and the response was great again!

That was my Aha! Moment 🤯

I realized,

“𝙋𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙣 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙚.”

💥 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲:

It was simple.

👉 Curated and taught by practitioners

👉 High focus on community ( Emulating college-like experience on the cloud )

👉 Promoting Proof of Work > Certificates

💥 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀:

There are 2 ways of building a business:

1️⃣ Raise money at the idea stage.

2️⃣ Validate your business idea first and then raise it if needed.

There was a lot of inbound interest from VC's to know what I am upto.

But I chose not to try raising money but rather put my life savings into it 🥶

But what were we?

A team of 3 full-time people and 3 interns 🥲

No product or tech team ( couldn't afford it )

This was our first office ( my 1bhk house 😅 )

At such an early stage,

I only picked people I could trust and bank 100% on to make this work, all of them from my existing network.

The team was lean and they still continue to work with me today.

All the interns are now full-time employees :))

We wasted no time and went in with a LEAN approach!

↗️ Logo? stock icon from Freepik.

🤙 Domain? Used a name I owned.

🕸️ Website? Used a Placeholder on WP.

📣 Social? Used a page I owned ( no posts )

💊 Product? Used no-code to build it

⚒️ Expensive Tools? leveraged LTD's

In fact, a few didn't even like/ understand what we were trying to do 😅

But that was ok 🥲

We were focused on our Northstar

PS: We are finally hiring for a social media rockstar ( hit me up )

💥 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 :

We focused on things that mattered to validate the idea.

We conducted multiple experiments with mentors gathering community feedback for all of our programs and finally

📑 Playbook the process and most importantly the screwups!

One program after another,

In just 2 months we launched 8 high impact programs with the best mentors and influencers in the country.

The response and support were tremendous 📈

With the limited resources,

We did almost close to a million dollars in business, profitably 🙏

𝗦𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲? 🤔

The real beauty of building anything is impacting at scale.

Impacting Millions of people.

That's what is exciting to build.

I firmly believe:

𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙙𝙤 𝙞𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙮𝙤𝙪’𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙙𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙩, 𝙞𝙩’𝙨 𝙖𝙡𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙘𝙧𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡

We decided to make the BIG BOLD BET

💥 𝗥𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘀:

I had no experience in raising funds before this.

Even during my pitching days,

we were a really small team and had no time nor the experience to build a pitch deck.

So we decided to go LEAN

A Notion doc. Quite literally 😅

To try the funding thing out,

I gave myself a timeline of 4 weeks ⏲️

if nothing happens,

I will go back to building business and come back 7-8 months later 💪

For almost a month I was completely off the business and did only one thing. PITCH!

The business was completely handled by the team

I was happy that I managed to build a strong team of owners 🙏

💥 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆:

It was simple,

1️⃣ Pitch funds that you are ok to lose out on.

2️⃣ Record the conversations and questions

3️⃣ Build answers to the questions and make the pitch better on the go!

So, just like the business, we playbooked it.

After multiple pitches, conversations,

we finally received a term sheet in a couple of weeks which we could accept 🥲🥲

Btw, it was my birthday. A nice surprise no?

We eventually launched our startup publicly.

Oh wait, almost forgot to tell you that we were on stealth for almost a year,

the reason?

We just didn't have the time/money/patience to build a website, manage social media etc 😂

So better keep it a secret right? Haha

Finally,

We found our partners in @sequoia, @owlvc and 80+ world-class angels.

We raised $5M as seed funding 🙏💪

Special shoutout to some awesome folks at @sequoia India: @2SharmaP, @kriti_kg;

@kritibansall and @amitashwinpatel from @OwlVC for making the process so seamless 🙏

Also, honorary mention to some real angels who committed even before any funds came in and have been helping me since the beginning :

@siddharth_ram
@atulsian
Arjun Vaidya
@abhisheknag
@RTinkslinger
@ppraveen

TIP: If you are ever raising money, get these guys on board FIRST

The happiest part, all the initial GS mentors are now Angel investors.

For most of them, it's the first Angel cheque( Happy tears )

@AnudeepAyyagari
@saptarshipr
@deepansiddhu
Ashwin kumar palo
@rajshamani
@AjeetK
@gosaliaanuj
@digitalpratik
@naggappan

it gives me immense confidence to see the best founders believing in what we are doing :

@riteshagar
@nikhilkamathcio
@kunalb11
@Austen
@caldbeckj
@aakrit
Umang Kumar
@NischalShetty
@drriteshmalik
@BimalRebba
@mukul_classplus
@atulsian

Contd.

@_anshuman26
@suumitshah
@prabhkiran13
@bhaswat11
@sanket_invideo
@namansr
@apaksh537
Mohak Goel
@videtj
@vardhanvaibhav
@misbahspeaks

Creators who have managed to capture the internet attention also believe we can change education for good :

@thetanmay
@varunduggi
@roshanabbas
@neerajarora91
@ericosiu
@ShaanVP
@financewsharan
@VarunMayya
@ShashankUdupa1
@ayushshukl99
@highdeepak
@paiganesh

And some rockstar domain experts showing their trust in the vision of GrowthSchool :

@abhisheknag
@rtinkslinger
@Saad__Ahmed_
@pradeepdesu
@ashramachandran
@Praval
@sai_ganesh
@kananrai
@motwanisuhas
@rmvenkat
@shrishtie
@rajivsodhi5

Continued :

@siddharth_ram
@rajeshsawhney
@tajkam23
@kyanekassiri
@iuditg
@mohit_gupta
@charanfunda
@amit_dubey0
Prabh Singh
@venusdhuria
Gaurav Batra

Continued :
@rahuldlm
Ankit Khemka
Tushar Mittal
Karthik Bhat
Vasant Rao
@alagathi
Ujjval Lulla
@kunalkhattar
Chandana Medapureddy
Akhil Paul
Varun Laul
@kushal079

So what's changed now? 😅

We now have,

Head of Product: @kingsidharth
Head of Engineering: @manur
Head of Supply: @pinnambharat
Head of Sales: @rajatsharma089

leading the show from the front.

We managed to scale from 6 members to 30+ member rockstar team 🚀

Over 200K+ learners
100+ awesome mentors and so on...

And also managed to build our office, which was a big dream, with growth schools profits and paid off for the whole year.

Oh btw, if everything you read is exciting and want to join the team.

We are HIRING for a bunch of leadership, mid-senior and jr roles.

We are looking for :

- Head of Business
- Chief of Staff
- Head of Programs
- Performance Marketers
- FrontEnd / BackEnd Engineers
- Rockstar interns

And so on...

Apply here: linkedin.com/company/growth…

If you find nothing that suits you, write to rockstars@growthschool .io

And obviously, if you are someone who would love to spread your knowledge and teach at GrowthSchool.

You can apply here : link.sisinty.com/mentor

If you are still reading it,

I bow down to you and thank you. hahaha 🙌

Drop a comment with "RTWDT"

Which means, read the whole damn thing :P

I would feel a Lil nice about it.

I am going to end the thread by throwing in the cliche line,

WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED 🙏😖😅

Here is an excellent breakdown of the story by @Inc42

inc42.com/startups/growt…

Oh the website is going bonkers

hit a max of 400+ real time.

Btw we made a super cool video.

Chose thread over video for Twitter for "reach purposes " :P

https://twitter.com/growthschoolio/status/1486588862868557825