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(This post was written by Javier Escribano , former co-founder of TouristEye and Selltag, and originally published on Medium . Javier is currently seeking a VP of Product, CTO or PM role. You can check his  LinkedIn profile  or  contact him  if interested)
I have raised 3 rounds of seed investment (~700k€ in total), no Series A yet; so my advice is limited by that experience. However, it’s consistent with the experience of other founders with more experience I talked with. The key learnings on this article are:
Plan your investment process with a board in Trello
Always find an intro
The pitch must be a conversation, not a monologue
Build three different decks, one for each stage of the process
Use Demo Days to strengthen the company brand
Plan your investment process with a board in Trello
I recommend you to have a Trello board for each round of investment. Add all the investors you want to talk to and then, move them through this funnel:
Discarded: Investors who have rejected you or you have discarded (they have invested in a competitor for example). To contact later: Investors who are interested but need to see more months of data. Intro to be found: You need to find someone who knows the investor. We have an intro: You know someone who can make an intro. 1st contact: You have talked with them once. 2nd contact: You have talked with them twice or more. Want to invest: Investors who want to invest. You should add the main information of the investor in the description of each card (range of investments, total investment per company, companies invested, people you know who can make an intro). Each time you have an interaction with them, add a comment on the card with their feedback or your impressions. That way, your co-founders can see the evolution and you don’t need to keep forwarding emails. Always find an intro
I’m sure you have already read this tip in many places, so consider it another reminder that it does work way better to have an intro than to send a cold email or call. Sometimes is hard to find someone who knows the investor, but you can always find a way. Of course, you can use LinkedIn; although be careful because lots of connections are really poor links. Before asking someone to make you an intro, ask him/her how good do they know the investor. Not all intros are worth the same 
Another way is to meet someone who knows the investor; and the best people are probably the founders/CEOs of the companies he/has invested in. You should ask someone you know for an intro to that founder (a cold email/tweet may work too), ask him/her for advice on investment/roadmap over coffee and then ask him/her if he/she thinks his/her investor is a good match for you. If he/she thinks so, there you have a good intro! The pitch must be a conversation, not a monologue
This is a typical mistake we do when we talk to investors. We try to communicate everything, assuring the investor we know everything about our business, we have a clear roadmap and we are the best team to achieve it. However, it’s not the best way to convince an investor. You have to make him/her engage with you intellectually, you want him/her to ask you questions you know the answer, you want him/her to get into the problem you are solving really deeply so he/she keeps thinking about it for the next days. If it’s a monologue, he/she will not remember. If you make him/her think about it and engage with the problem; you will in a better position to convince him/her. Take into account that when you are talking to an investor, your competitors aren’t the company competitors but other startups which are also raising and talking with him/her. The investor can only invest in a few per year, and he/she will end up comparing deals. Build three different decks, one for each stage of the process
I recommend you to have 3 different decks:
Intro deck
This is the deck you will send over email to an investor to check if he/she is interested. It should have 10–12 slides, with key information about the team, problem, key parts of the solution and your metrics. Slides should be simple, with 1–3 phrases per slide; the investor will glance over them to see if it’s worth spending time on you. Examples of slides with just one phrase. Meeting deck
There are investors who prefer to talk on the meeting instead of following the script of your deck; and there are others who prefer to follow the deck and then ask you questions. In both cases you will need a deck with much more information that the Intro deck but removing the phrases you are going to say. Remember they should look at you 80% of the time, not to the slides. Examples of slides with just one phrase. If you follow the deck on the meeting, you shouldn’t show all the slides. Leave many of them at the end, specially the ones which dig deeply into a topic (user acquisition, patents, tech…). If the investor asks about it, you have the slide. You will earn two points: one for being brief on the pitch and another for having the information prepared. After meeting deck
Investors will ask you for the Meeting deck. You can’t send it because it doesn’t have the key phrases you said. You need to add those key phrases into the deck and reorganize it a bit so it follows a logical order (no just-in-case slides at the end). Extra: Demo Day deck
This deck is like the Meeting deck but with just the slides you are going to pitch. You may need to remove text from it to make sure everyone looks at you 80% of the time (if people read the slide instead of listening to you, you have failed as a presenter). We can summarize them:
Use Demo Days to strengthen the company brand
Don’t think Demo Days or public pitches will bring you an investor just after the pitch. It doesn’t happen. The only place I’ve personally seen it was in a 500 Startup Demo Day in Silicon Valley, when a founder of another startup received a text just after finishing her pitch saying he wanted to close the round with $100k. But the truth is that she had already talked him over email. I’m sure there will cases, but they are just 0.01%. What you need to do in those pitches is strengthen the company brand so investors and potential new employees remember your company later; andmake sure everyone who listen will agree that you seem to be a trustworthy and reliable CEO. If you do, they will be more predisposed to meet with you even if it’s a cold email or call. Enjoy the show and have fun, but don’t worry too much. The best startups almost never were the best ones in Demo Days anyway.

Tips for first-time entrepreneurs on the process of raising investment

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The mobile and secondhand marketplace sector has one less competitor. Selltag , the startup co-founded by Ruben Colomer, Juan Luis Hortelano, Walter Kobylanski and CEO Javier Escribano, disappeared last week from both the iOS and Android app stores and it is not coming back. Escribano left the company in mid August and, despite the fact that the company’s original team and investors tried to keep it alive, it is shutting down for good. Selltag had raised €325,000 from various backers, including Valencia-based accelerator Plug and Play Spain, Vitamina K, Civeta, Danka Capital and business angel Carlos Domingo. User engagement and retention
The company was originally co-founded by Colomer, Hortelano and Kobylanski in 2012. Then, Selltag was a web-based marketplace for used items, but two years later it changed its focus to adopt a mobile first strategy. Escribano joined the company as both co-founder and CEO in 2013, a few months after leaving TouristEye following its acquisition by Lonely Planet . In a phone conversation with Novobrief, Escribano said that the company’s main problem was user engagement and retention. “In every marketplace you have the chicken-and-egg problem with buyers and sellers. We tried to capture them both organically and via paid marketing, but it wasn’t enough. Getting sellers was somewhat easy, but buyers much more complicated”, he explained. Escribano also talked about how capital intensive the mobile marketplace sector has become. “You need a lot of capital to achieve a high level of matching between buyers and sellers. Wallapop has done it very well and Letgo has enough money to try to get there”. Wallapop has raised more than $140 million in venture funding and Letgo launched its app over the summer with strong financial support from Nasper ($100 million) . In the process of raising a new round of funding
Selltag was in the middle of a financing round that would have allowed it to continue operating and growing. “We were close to raising a new round, but I decided not to continue with the project”, Escribano said. Selltag had more than 250,000 downloads and 55,000 registered users. The company’s investors said that they did not see Escribano’s departure coming and that it was a bit of a surprise. “Javier did a good job with the fundraising process, but his decision came at a moment where we didn’t have many options left”, Ruben Colomer noted. Colomer added that he strongly believed in the power of Telotransporto , a feature the company launched in July that served it to differentiate from competitors like Wallapop and Letgo. While the latter are exclusively focused on local and street-level transactions, with Telotransporto Selltag wanted to cater to users who were willing to sell products to people in other Spanish cities. The service cost €4,99 and Selltag promised to deliver products in less than 24 hours. “It was not a perfect product, but potential investors showed interest in the model and saw it as a way of separating ourselves from competitors”, he said. Following Escribano’s departure, Selltag’s co-founders tried to continue with the project, but the company’s cash position and sudden changes were too much to overcome. “They probably think that I was too pessimistic about the future of Selltag, but I think they were too optimistic”, Escribano said. To sell, to continue or to shut down
“In August we got together and we discussed what to do. We talked and we all agreed that it was worth continuing with the project. We had three options: shut down, sell our assets or push forward. We tried the latter but it was not the right time to do so”, Colomer added. Novobrief also understands that the company was close to selling its assets, allowing investors to get their money back and a small profit, but the deal fell through. “Javier thought that it was too difficult to continue and that the metrics were lower than expected. He left and we tried to find a solution, but we couldn’t. I can only respect Javier’s decision”, Iñaki Arrola from Vitamina K commented. “It’s better to shut down on time than to continue at any cost”.

Mobile marketplace startup Selltag has shut down

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“What people really want is to sell stuff they don’t need, but they often don’t care where the buyer is from”. That’s Javier Escribano’s, co-founder and CEO of Selltag , response when asked about the company’s latest service, Telotransporto. Launched last week, Telotransporto is a courier service designed for buyers and sellers that operate on Selltag’s marketplace. When an agreement between two parties is reached, Selltag offers them the possibility of having the products shipped to a different city or region within Spain for €4,99. The company will be in charge of collecting the items at buyer’s homes and delivering them in less than 24 hours. The unveiling of Teletransporto also has another big implication for the small Madrid-based startup, which is that Selltag will now begin to collect payments -using Braintree- and to allow for transactions to be fully completed on its platform. Besides the €4,99 fee, the company will charge a 10% commission based on the value of the product being shipped, up to €40. “This means that if a product is sold for €800 we will only keep €40, instead of €80”, Javier says. In cases where the buyer and seller are in the same city and wish to meet in person, Selltag will continue to be a free product. Selltag: not just local transactions
Javier explained that the company has been looking to offer these kind of services since day one. “We’ve always been focused on Spain as a whole, and not just on local transactions”, he said. According to the company, over the past three months 78% of user conversations/negotiations that have taken place on Selltag where made between users that were, at least, 50 kilometres apart. “All of them are now potential clients of ours thanks to Telotransporto”, he added. These are the first signs of Selltag’s monetisetion strategy since the app was launched last year. The company said that at the end of January it had 100,000 downloads, and than in June that number had grown to 210,000. It also said that last month it had 50,000 active users. Transactions seem to be also growing at healthy rates. In the first six months of 2015 Selltag’s users sold items valued at €870,000, four times as much than in the second half of 2014. Competition in the mobile marketplace industry is an all time high
The number of startups disrupting the used goods market has skyrocketed over the past couple of years, as most apply a geolocation and mobile layer to what up until now were basically web experiences. Barcelona-based Wallapop is a clear example of this, having raised more than $140 million from Fidelity, Accel Partners or Insight Ventures. The secretive startup is now available in the US and in most European markets, as it competes head-to-head with other well-funded companies like VarageSale or OfferUp. It’s worth noting that Wallapop has no business model and doesn’t make any money yet. Selltag is smaller than most of its competitors -having raised €325,000 from Vitamina K, Danka Capital and Civeta - but it seems comfortable with its different approach. “Our dream scenario is one where buying products on Selltag is as easy as buying on Amazon”, Javier says. “One where you know that everything you buy is secure and you’ll receive great customer service. That’s our roadmap”.

It’s not just local: Selltag introduces shipping service, shows first signs of monetisation strategy

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The second hand market in Spain is heating up and Selltag is going to add more wood to the fire. The startup founded in late 2013 by Walter Kobylanski (Gigas, Danka Capital), Rubén Colomer, Juan Luis Hortelano (both from Plug and Play Spain ) and led by Javier Escribano (TouristEye, acquired by Lonely Planet) has just closed a €325,000 round led by Vitamina K and other firms and business angels such as Civeta , Danka Capital , Carlos Domingo, Steve Olechowski or José María Torroja. Prior to this round, Selltag had raised a small seed round from Plug and Play. Traditionally, buyers and sellers of second hand products have connected on the web, on sites such as Segundamano, Milanuncios (acquired by Segundamano’s owner Schibsted for €100 million) or Craigslist at an international level. However, the transition of consumption towards mobile phones has created new opportunities for startups by making the whole process of selling and buying easier for both parties involved. While legacy players like Segundamano have recently launched their first mobile apps, others like Wallapop (also Spanish, recently raised €3 million from Accel Partners), Vinted and Selltag have realized that growth is no longer on the web, but on smartphones. Selltag’s Android app has been used by more than 50,000 people over the past four months and those numbers will probably only increase in the near future with the launch of apps for iOS and the improvement of the startups’ current product. To know more about how Selltag wants to tackle this market and what they’re bringing to an already crowded table, we sat down with CEO Javier Escribano for a short interview. Read on for more details on Selltag and how Javier’s previous experience with TouristEye played a role in this new round of financing. Q&A with Javier Escribano, Selltag’s CEO
Built TouristEye and sold it to Lonely Planet. However, it didn’t take you long to be back in the game building a new startup. Why so fast? I didn’t plan it. My idea was to be there for some time integrating TouristEye’s technology into Lonely Planet. However I didn’t like Nashville very much (LP’s headquarters are there). I like cities where you can walk or ride a bike, not cities where you need a car for everything. Also, the integration process was going to take longer than expected because of their technology. Once I decided to come back to Spain, Juan Luis, Rubén and Walter -who had started Selltag- explained to me the opportunity they were seeking and we started discussing options. I realized that the market was still small but growing a lot, and that I could help change it with my previous experience with mobile and communities. So I decided to change paths. A lot of people might think Selltag was just born, but the company is more than a year old. What have you guys been doing over the past few months? Has Selltag’s strategy changed much since then? After I joined the company in April we set a mobile-first approach and we focused on our Android app. We launched it in the beginning of August and we have been growing quite fast since then, like 16.5% weekly. We’ve been learning as much as possible about the market, fixing bugs, raising money, hiring talent, etc. Our mission hasn’t changed: “remove laziness from buyers and sellers”. Segundamano and Wallapop in Spain. Vinted and others in Europe. The mobile & second hand market is quite crowded. What does Selltag bring to the table that the rest of competitors don’t? We’re obsessively focused on user experience. Segundamano, Milanuncios or Wallapop only care about the fact that you have published your post on their platform, and that’s exactly the starting point for us. We can help you improve your post, your description, use our search algorithms so your post appears on more searches despite whatever description you have added, connect you to buyers, help you in that process, etc. There are a lot of pain points in the process of buying and selling, and people don’t sell because of that. If it was easier, people would sell 10 times more products than they do now. It’s often said that each one of us has like €2,000 in products we don’t use in our homes. Also there is the security and trust side. Anyone can post anything on those sites, there is no control of scammers and I can post whatever I want with a fake email. So there is fraud and because of that people just want to buy and sell in person. If we drive away those scammers and we implement security mechanisms, people will buy and sell from other parts of the country, not just in their neighborhood. It’s a long process we have ahead, but we are really committed to improving the sector. “We want to remove laziness from buyers and sellers”
 
Is this a winner takes all market or is there enough space for various competitors to coexist in the future? There is enough space for various competitors. In fact that’s what has happened in Spain. Segundamano was the leader in 2012. Then Milanuncios came along and reached the same level in 2013 without damaging Segundamano. And Wallapop has done the same again in 2014. People post their ads on several sites and apps. We hope to be their first option because it’s easier and trustworthier for them. At a recent talk, you mentioned that when it comes to Selltag’s business model “you’re not going to try to reinvent the wheel”. Is growing in this market a matter of making things easier for buyers and sellers instead of coming up with innovative -and maybe unuseful- features? I’d differentiate how we are going to earn money from what we are going to offer to our users. Of course there are a lot of innovative features and processes that we will add in 2015, but it’s also true that we first need to solve the egg-and-chicken problem, having enough buyers and sellers. Having like 40,000 more users in 6 weeks is helping. Remember that there are many kinds of innovations (product, process, business model, costs, marketing…). You raised a few financing rounds while at TouristEye. What did you learn then that you’ve applied now with Selltag? What mistakes have you avoid making that, perhaps, you made a few years ago? There are two key things that I’ve learned. The first one is to talk to investors (business angels) way before you are going to seriously start raising money. In April we started talking to several business angels about the project. Once we contacted them in September, they were in because they saw that we were really serious and we were moving fast. The second one is to create momentum. There was this week in late September were almost everyone was saying yes, and we kept reducing the available space each day. So we basically knew we had a pool of investors to choose, and we had to know them better to understand if they were the best fit for this phase. We could have raised more, but we didn’t like that idea because we are in the validation phase. For us, it wouldn’t have made sense to raise €1 million just because we could. But creating momentum is really hard and we were lucky. Our previous experience -both mine and my cofounders’- definitively helped.

Selltag closes €325,000 investment round

Twittear
La historia de Selltag es muy interesante y encaja muy bien con mi idea de que el futuro del negocio de los anuncios clasificados está en el móvil . Conocí personalmente este proyecto cuando su foco estaba puesto en las redes sociales y aún no habían dado el salto al móvil. En ese momento tenía sentido explorar posibilidades para convertir la compra venta de productos entre particulares en una actividad social. Ahora que el protagonismo en los negocios online lo han tomado el consumo colaborativo y las apps, tiene todo el sentido que la apuesta pase por el móvil, sobre todo por las facilidades que ofrece para los usuarios que quieren vender todo aquello que ya no usan y para gente que quiere comprar cosas a un mejor precio porque son de segunda mano. Esta es la propuesta que está empezando a validar Selltag, con el liderazgo del emprendedor Javier Fernandez Escribano y el apoyo de otros emprendedores como Walter Kobylanski, cofundador de Gigas y Business Angel en Danka Capital, así como Rubén Colomer y Juan Luis Hortelano, cofundadores de Plug and Play Spain, una de las mayores aceleradoras de startups en España. Selltag comienza de esta forma a competir con Wallapop que está muy bien financiado, cada vez se hace más grande y más popular. Para lograrlo a decidido empezar por los usuarios de móviles basados en Android y se propone ser transaccional para que los usuarios puedan comprar y vender sus productos con todas las facilidades posibles y la mayor seguridad. Sin comentarios
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Selltag is an online trading platform with a website and mobile apps. On Selltag users can publish ads for free to sell the things you have at home, offer services and buy things other users are selling.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
10/21/2015	Dead		Dead	$XXM	0 FY undefined	1
12/17/2014	Seed VC	$XXM	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	10/21/2015	12/17/2014
Round	Dead	Seed VC
Amount		$XXM
Investors	Dead	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	10

First funding	Last Funding	Investor	Rounds	Type	Location
12/17/2014	12/17/2014	Steve Olechowski	1 Seed VC	Angel Investor (Individual)
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Dansk Kapital	Subscribe to see more	Private Equity	Denmark
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Carlos Domingo	Subscribe to see more	Angel Investor (Individual)	Spain
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	VitaminaK	Subscribe to see more	Angel Investor (Group)	Spain
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Jose Maria Torroja	Subscribe to see more	Angel Investor (Individual)

First funding	12/17/2014	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000
Last Funding	12/17/2014	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000
Investor	Steve Olechowski	Dansk Kapital	Carlos Domingo	VitaminaK	Jose Maria Torroja
Rounds	1 Seed VC	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Board Seats
Type	Angel Investor (Individual)	Private Equity	Angel Investor (Individual)	Angel Investor (Group)	Angel Investor (Individual)
Location		Denmark	Spain	Spain

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