You can still raise impractical levels of funding even though you’re not raising from professional VC or PE investors.
15 years ago, at the start of the cloud software and SaaS wave, it was still pretty normal for startups to raise money to get started, then raise again and again to scale up in big new markets.
Especially if you made software for consumers or small businesses with low monthly price points. Higher CAC to lower LTV payback strikes again.
Jerry Nettuno started Schedulicity in Bozeman, Montana, in 2009 after struggling to book his own haircut as a single father.
He recruited his first developers from Denver, paid for the build himself, and launched online scheduling for hairstylists, trainers, and other small service businesses at $29 a month, starting with about a hundred customers around Bozeman.
To fund a bigger team and faster growth reaching very small service businesses, Nettuno raised millions from angels and one large private investor, never from venture capital.
Schedulicity grew to 15,000 to 20,000 small businesses, almost 40 million consumers, $10 to $20 million in revenue, and about 100 employees, but growth stalled after COVID.
The company had raised about $28 million in total private capital. Smaller angels and a big angel.
He sold to Vagaro in early 2025, and now co-founds Pulsara, which expects about $30 million in ARR.
“I would definitely not have raised the money that we did when we did. I could only do so much on my own, but I think we could have bootstrapped a little longer and not had to raise as much money. Things were so different at the time that it was hard to see, but it’s very clear looking back.
“Not to mention, in today’s world we could have run the same company that we sold with probably a fraction of the employees. When seventy percent of founders say they’d raise less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that every time you raise money, the benchmark is raised.
“The more money you raise, the more it exponentially increases the amount you’d have to sell the company for to get the same amount. I remember seeing an article early on that talked about that. Once you raise the bigger money, you’d have to sell the company at two hundred million to come away with the same kind of return as you could have sold it for twenty-five.”
A rule of thumb for efficient outside funding is that your profitable revenue exceeds the total amount you raised. You reached escape velocity and won’t raise any more growth funding.
You can still raise “impractical” levels of funding even though you’re not raising from professional VC or PE investors.
Check out this revealing interview with Jerry Nettuno on the Practical Founders Podcast.
