Tech Hub: AngelPad

Paintzen 

When Paintzen Co-founder and COO Justin Geller joined Angelpad in 2013, he and his co-workers already had a strong foundation for their business. Still, Korte and Magescas immediately impressed him with the amount of expertise and personalized advice they gave the business. Paintzen helps connect painters to consumers online by providing quotes, booking and help with the payment process. Over the next three months, Geller and his team fleshed out and solidified every part of their business, from development to managing employees and contractors. By Demo Day, the team had perfected a concise business pitch and received a swarm of meetings and interest from investors.

“Because it is such a small group, the three months are packed with one-on-one meetings and daily feedback that taught us how to strengthen the core elements of our business,” Geller says. “We came out as a much stronger company after those months, and it was thanks to Thomas and Carine.”

Their close work with AngelPad paid off  – Paintzen raised a total of $7.2 million in 2015. Today, they continue to raise revenues and plan to debut their offering into an additional eight cities, expanding their reach. 

Fieldwire

Fieldwire CEO Yves Frinault not only met his mentors at AngelPad, but also joined a supportive community that helped him each step of the way. Frinault is still great friends with many of the other founders he worked with to find funding. 

“We learned how to think about our company from an investor’s perspective,” Frinault says. “We learned how to pitch to them effectively and answer the question: Why should they invest their time and money into the solution we’re trying to build?” 

Fieldwire, an app construction workers use to create projects, has grown since Angelpad. They quad-rupled their team’s size and increased revenue tenfold in the past year and a half, Frinault adds. This January they reached more than 100,000 projects. Now they are continuing to apply what they learned to expand their product offering and create partnerships with more companies serving the construction space. 

“I remember Thomas told us to be both aggressive when negotiating deal terms and frugal in how we run our company day to day,” he says. “If you can do both of those things well, you can focus on execution and create a company that provides value, which will effectively set you up for success.”