CustomMade

“So in 2011, we went out and we raised money from Google and first round capital and a few other top shelf VCs and they bought into the marketplace concept.”

“We had 60 people at our height. We were burning like half a million dollars a month. And just, you know, flooring it towards a wall that we kind of all saw.”

“And that's what we sold our venture capitalists on. And we raised about thirty million dollars.”

“We ended up doing a transaction with Wayfair, which was another business in Boston. All of our employees were able to get a job at Wayfair, which was nice. Except for me. And yeah, we had a party and closed the gate. It was this big iron gate and put the lock …”

“I mean, to be honest, looking back it was the only way that we'd be able to raise money.”

“And in 2011, as soon as I said the word marketplace, it's kind of like the AI of, you know, of today. As soon as I said the word marketplace everyone wanted it in our deal.”

“And that then started the ride of really building something that Did not have product market fit, but it had product market fit with our venture capitalists.”

“We raised two million dollars from Google, first round capital, a whole bunch of, you know, angels and stuff like that. Four months later, we raised another four million. A year later, we raised 10. Actually, it was 18 total between secondary debt and equity. …”

“In order to customize anything, whether it's an engagement ring or a dining room table, it requires a tremendous amount of back and forth between the consumer and the maker. And because we were extracting a 10% fee from this process, we wanted to be involved i…”

“My co-founder actually still runs the company. We ended up closing it doing a foreclosure. He took it out of bankruptcy. He pivoted it to a jewelry site where they do all the work.”

“W w what we found was the people who won projects were actually really good salespeople. They weren't the best makers. They weren't even necessarily the best maker for the person who had like said what they wanted. They're just really good at selling themselve…”

“The first couple of years, like, we got ourselves pretty quickly to, like, a couple million dollars a month in platform revenue, on which we were taking a 10% fee. So, you know, the couple million dollars a month equals, like, a hundred grand, 200 grand, somet…”

“One of the big mistakes that I made, which we probably don't have time to get into is when we took venture capital, we started hiring people who were like the scale people the people you bring in to help you scale the company, usually after you have product br…”

“We went out to Greylock to convince them to invest in custom made, which they said they would if we moved out to California and worked for the CEO that they were going to place into the business.”

“Getting something custom is an incredibly intimate back and forth conversation that can be, you know, dozens of back and forth communications before anything actually happens. And we tried to like put ourselves into the middle of that. And it didn't, it just d…”

“Yeah, we were burning it at about 600,000 dollars a month at our height.”

“Seth and four other people remained at custom made. And essentially bought it out of bankruptcy. And he has done the miraculous job of pivoting it to a jewelry site.”