$185 billion is spent on private event services every year in the US alone. Yet service providers (such as venue operators, photographers, caterers, and event coordinators) currently need to use separate tools to run a successful business.
They use traditional listing portals to get leads outside their initial friend and family network, tools that help to convert these leads into paying customers (discovery, quotes, contracts, deposit and full payments), and other solutions to run day-to-day business administration. The result is increasing cost, poorly qualified leads, and friction at every transaction step.
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Breezit comes to the market with a unique value proposition. As a SaaS-enabled marketplace, Breezit offers both the customer acquisition and business management solutions, so event service providers can focus on what they love.
BADideas.fund is proud to announce Breezit as our first investment - a pre-seed €100K SAFE note investment as part of a bigger round, that's in the process of closing.
Why Breezit? BADideas.fund first investment needed to tick many boxes to fit our ideal profile and relay the right message about the type of startups we'd like to invest in the future:
- It had to be B2B SaaS or marketplace âś…
- Big market - $1T âś…
- Competitive advantage in distribution - focus on product led growth and growth loops âś…
- Founders either from or with roots in CEE, that know the fundamentals of building a rocketship startup. âś…
- Founders with global ambition, ideally with US as the target market (as that's where part of the BADideas.fund community is based and can help with the next round in the US) âś…
With over 100 startups waiting in our pipeline for investment, here is how we decided to invest in Breezit as our flagship startup. Having reviewed their application, we liked their vision, approach to distribution and product-led growth focus, so we advanced them to the next step - set up an interview.
At BADideas.fund we have members form a deal evaluation team - they interview the founders, and evaluate the startup based on our deal evaluation framework. Breezit is a SaaS enabled marketplace, so who better to lead the evaluation and interview process than Daniel Marhel, ex-CPO & CMO at Printify (the marketplace for custom printing; $54M funding) - scaled GMV to $100M.
During the 1h interview we didn't just try to just understand how the founders think and about their business, but also try sharing practical feedback either on the pitch or advice on their growth challenge. But it was not just great impressions. We also saw plenty of reasons why Breezit could fail:
- Demand side - weddings are low frequency business - need to expand touch points and make UX excellent to keep top of mind. Though it does not affect SaaS part of the business.
- Risk of launching in the US - more competition than in Lithuania.
We packaged our analysis of the investment case in a structured investment memo and shared that with our members. Soon after we have 21 of BADideas.fund members, who are founders and startup operators themselves, investing in aggregate €100,000 in Breezit.
BADideas.fund is an early stage angel syndicate, providing €50K-€100K funding for CEE startups, led by founders & operators. Among members/investors - founders and operators, who’ve been building such companies as Bolt ($1.3B funding), Vimeo ($450M), Printify ($54M), Pandadoc ($51M), Pipedrive ($90M), Apollo.io ($151M), Bird ($783M funding), Shopify ($122M), Whimsical ($30M), Lokalise ($56M), Deel ($679M).
We are looking for the most promising startups in the CEE region. If you're a founder and see a fit with BADideas.fund, don't hesitate to apply. If you have a startup in mind for BADideas.fund, we encourage you to submit them - referral incentive applies.
Originally posted on Linkedin on 5 July 2022
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