145. Intro + Trick Question feat. Abby Mercado, CEO @ Rescripted

I first met this week's guest, Abby Mercado, at Techstars Boulder a few years ago. SpringTime did not end up investing in her business, but she kept me on her updates list. In the spring of this year, she responded to one of my LinkedIn posts, commenting about VCs trick questions. She totally called me out, in a nice way, about my own VC trick question. It got me thinking about that question and how I could do better by founders. I've since dropped that, which was about exits, and have approached it in a more conversational, less binary way with founders. I was really grateful that she brought it up to me and helped me see my actions for what they were. And so I asked her to share her fundraising advice for you. And I sure I'm glad that she agreed. Take it away, Abby.

Hi there. I am Abby Mercado. I'm the Co-founder and CEO of Rescripted. Rescripted is the number one global media platform for women's health and fertility. We reach about 9 million people on a monthly basis, and we provide content, tools, and resources for wherever you are in your reproductive life cycle from first period to last period. I learned a lot during fundraising, and one of the key things that I learned is investors can be super sneaky. They tend to ask a few sneaky questions that really can make or break you in their eyes. The first is, where do you see the business in five years? This is almost always a hundred million in revenue. Which is kind of funny. The math is funny. It rarely works out, sometimes it does, but make sure that you are showing that path to that number from a revenue perspective. Essentially the reason that investors want to do this is they, they want some shot at seeing how large you can get. Can this be a publicly traded company? They want to place big bets even though they know that not all of their portfolio companies will be huge wins, they at least want to try for that win. That can be a really tricky one. You definitely don't wanna be just like chugging along doing, you know, doing this whole fun thing that you love doing. That's not the answer. Do not say that.