I suppose I don’t know for certain my startup was price $10 million. It’s not like somebody wrote a $10 million test and handed it to me in change for my firm. Nevertheless, on the time of the story I’m about to share, I’d already efficiently raised a seven-figure seed spherical, my firm was rising quick, and I used to be making ready to lift a Sequence A that valued the enterprise at $10 million.

Sure, I notice making ready to lift a spherical isn’t the identical as having the cash within the financial institution, however I had all our present buyers lined up for his or her portion of the follow-on capital, and I used to be weeks away from a visit to the West Coast for a sequence of in-person follow-up conferences with a handful of Silicon Valley VCs who’d all expressed robust curiosity in filling out the rest of the spherical. In different phrases, despite the fact that the money wasn’t within the financial institution, I felt fairly good about my possibilities of getting a time period sheet valuing my firm over $10 million within the subsequent few months as long as we stored rising like we’d been.

The important thing to elevating capital was easy: proceed rising on the similar trajectory and by doing the identical issues. Sadly, I couldn’t do this as a result of I used to be a silly entrepreneur who received distracted by a dialog with the fallacious buyer.

The fateful dialog started as a gross sales pitch to a senior-level supervisor at a widely known Fortune 1000 firm. The gross sales pitch was for our core product — a SaaS platform serving to with worker onboarding and coaching. We had constructed traction with mid-market firms however knew that touchdown an enterprise shopper may actually speed up our development.

The Fortune 1000 supervisor appeared however threw me a curveball. “That is nice,” he stated once I’d completed my pitch, “however have you ever thought of making use of your expertise to new franchise proprietor onboarding? That’s an even bigger want for us.”

I used to be caught off guard by the query, however I used to be intrigued. Whereas our platform wasn’t constructed for franchise house owners, I instantly noticed…