The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 9 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Salguero: CustomMade Had Product-Market Fit With VCs, Not Real Customers
“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.”
Salguero: Sales skills beat craftsmanship on CustomMade's marketplace platform
“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…”
Salguero: "Marketplace" in 2011 drove VC hype just like AI today
“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.”
Salguero: Policing Marketplace Comms to Protect Fees Introduces Fatal Friction
“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…”
Salguero: CustomMade Pivoted to Marketplace Model Solely to Raise VC Funding
“I mean, to be honest, looking back it was the only way that we'd be able to raise money.”
CustomMade reached several million in monthly GMV taking a 10% fee
“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…”
Salguero: CustomMade Foreclosed and Reemerged From Bankruptcy as Jewelry Business
“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.”
Salguero: CustomMade Raised About $30M From Google Ventures, First Round, Others
“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. …”
Salguero: Hiring scaling executives before PMF was a major mistake
“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…”