Launching Make Studios in LA
Announcing my new role as a Partner at a rad startup studio.
TL;DR: I’m joining Make Studios as a Partner and awesome founders should apply. 👋
The Gap
“You’re too early.”
Heard that one before? It’s the frustration-inducing investor response that early-stage founders hear on repeat as they seek to raise funding pre-traction. The rise of no-code/low-code tools and the decrease in infrastructure costs combined with the trendiness of startups means that there are just more deals for investors to look at, and more founders working on similar ideas. As a result, more and more traction is required to gain pre-seed, angel, or even accelerator funding, creating a growing gap in early-stage venture.
For startups, the amount of capital required to break through this barrier is surprisingly small if you build wisely. Maybe some paid ads to test customer demand. A few hours of your time spent interviewing customers. A small budget to cobble together some SaaS APIs and code scripts to simulate a customer experience. But it’s a bad fit for VCs, who need to invest significant enough check sizes to capture the equity stake they need to hit unicorn gold. It’s also a bad fit for debt- or revenue-based financing that requires purchase orders or other assets.
I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Make Studios, a venture studio that invests in and partners with idea-stage founders, as a SoCal-based Partner to find and fund founders fighting through this gap and help them break through it.
Evolution
Make started in Belgium (Make it Studio) getting startups off the ground from Day 1. After building over 300 products and creating a real-world-tested development process, the studio founders realized they could have a bigger impact on the success of the companies they worked with by more closely partnering with founders to de-risk their business ideas. Through coaching entrepreneurs in Lean and Agile methodologies and focusing on getting a product quickly into market, they turned 4 ideas into growing startups in 2 years.
We’re now a 15-person studio that can execute on design, development, and marketing, and our Co-founder, Alexis Bedoret, came to the US to scale the model to larger markets. Since then, we’ve added 4 new companies to our portfolio across a diverse range of sectors (hospitality, transit, real estate, and sports). We’ve added capital to our offerings to remove another barrier faced by idea-stage founders and we’re looking for passionate, driven founders who are looking to build a venture-funded startup.
Good Fit
Investor/founder fit goes both ways, so we like to look for founders who we’d be most helpful to. For us that means you’re not yet in market, technology is a crucial component of your business model, and you have a testable value proposition that we can get into market and making revenue in 6 months max. We’re scrappy ourselves and look for that same trait in founders. We also look for strong founder/market fit, evidence of grit, and an obsession with solving a real problem.
Mission
I’m continuing to pursue my personal mission to eliminate underrepresentation in tech that I worked on for years at Backstage Capital. I believe Make Studios will be a great partner for underestimated founders, many of whom don’t have family and friends or the personal wealth to front the cash required to experiment with new and risky ideas, or perhaps don’t have access to networks that facilitate building startups.
How many women, people of color, or otherwise underrepresented founders get stuck in the loop of getting enough capital to continue building, while never getting support from investors? How many great companies, and what impactful innovation, is the world missing out on?
We’re not impact investors. We’re not a non-profit doing charity work. We simply want to put resources behind amazing founders — wherever they come from, whatever they look like, and whoever they know — so that great ideas, with great execution, can turn into great achievements for all of humanity.
Call to Action
If all that sounds exciting to you and you think we might be able to collaborate, I invite you to apply on our new US website!
