The wait lasted for 63 minutes before Lunchbox made its first sale, and during that wait, I was reminded of how exhilarating, fun, and stressful the launch of a new startup is.

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I'm proud to announce that Jeanne & I have invested in our latest venture: Lunchbox. We've teamed up with good friends of ours to make this a reality and we're really excited about what the future holds.

But then again I'm probably biased about this... See, photography is probably the only "hobby" that I practice enough to even classify it as a hobby. My work takes up most of my days, which means that something that was a hobby in the past (technology, the internet and even reading) has now become more of a chore. Photography however remains.

So I'm very excited to be part of a new startup that will hopefully make photography more fun and help thousands / millions (?) of people take better photos. Check it out if you have a minute!

In this post Fred Wilson goes on to explain that a company should first scale & gather traction on seed funding before it goes after venture round funding. Whilst WooThemes has never taken any outside funding (we’ve bootstrapped from the beginning), Fred’s post did make me think twice about when it’s a good idea to re-invest earnings into a company.

So with WooThemes, we’ve been steadily gained traction and grown our revenues & user base since we started out, without having to really re-invest those revenues (in one significant decision) back into the business. Instead we have been very lucky in that we have a very cash flow positive business and we are thus able to cover all immediate expenditures (capital included) from those revenues.

But similarly to Squarespace (who just announced their first outside funding of $38.5m in 7 years), I can see merit in re-investing funds in a rapid growth campaign / strategy.

I think when things are going well and a business is growing steadily, it is easy to start applying revenues to optimize a business just enough to fuel that steady growth rate. But if you’re keen to ramp things up quickly & significantly, then a significant re-investment in that strategy is probably required.

Even whilst writing this post though, I’m personally at odds about how I see this strategy, as I’ve never been the kind of entrepreneur that simply wanted to throw money at something; much less a growth strategy. Instead I believe in organic growth, innovation, great ideas & clever marketing solutions.

What do you think?

A few thoughts on why first-time attempts at raising funding are failing.

So as I’ve mentioned before, I’m really keen to do some angel / seed investing (via iincubate, which will also fall under the radiiate umbrella) in the future and as a result I’ve been following quite a few influential peeps in that space as a way to build up my own knowledgebase.

Up until now, I have zero experience with angel / seed investments and the bit of theory that I do know, I picked up during my graduate studies in Business Management. That being said, I don’t think that angel investing is overly hard to grasp, as it is not much different to any other form of investing (imho as a newbie).

I’d think that it would be possible to make a solid investment decision based on the following two factors:

• Does the idea make sense? Irrespective of how speculative the idea is, if it makes sense and it’s possible to turn it into a sustainable & potentially profitable idea, then your investment should be fine.
• Does the business / revenue model make sense? How dependent are those on external factors & assumptions? What percentage uptake / number of customers do you need to cover overheads?

As far as I understand (and this is my mentality with regards to angel investments), the idea is to take a small percentage of a startup at a conservative price level (so you need to get in early). Based on that, it is thus possible to limit one’s risk exposure with great potential in terms of earning a proper ROI if the idea & business model does gather traction.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, as these are just the thoughts that I have been playing with in my head… I still have a lot to learn obviously and most things I’ll only end up learning with future experiences. In the meantime though, my plan is (as it has always been) to simply wing it and learn on the job…