Carro's Million-Dollar Success in a Challenging Startup Landscape

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Raising Millions of Dollars in Today’s Challenging Startup Environment: How Did Carro Do It?

David Perry is the Founder and CEO of Carro, an Orange County SaaS company revolutionizing e-commerce.

Their tagline is: “Sell more Together.” Perry’s previous company sold to Sony PlayStation for $385M in cash and was backed by Benchmark Capital and NEA. In today’s ‘How Did You Do It?’, we sat down with Perry to learn how he was able to successfully raise capital in today’s unfavorable fundraising conditions.

David, what is CARRO?

If you make a product and get it into retail stores like Target, that’s really exciting! What a great day!

We asked ourselves, “If you’re an online brand, who will help get your products into lots of other online stores?” Nobody.

Also, “Who’s helping you find additional high-quality products to increase the sales in your store? With ZERO risk.” Nobody.

We saw the opportunity and went after it.

So, are brands using Carro today?

Yes, over 28,000 brands have installed Carro directly into their e-commerce stores.

For a clear example, take a brand like Blendjet, which makes portable blenders. Blendjet is now being sold in multiple other stores using Carro technology, including Paris Hilton’s store. All those orders are transmitted back to Blendjet, so that they can fulfill them.

Blendjet could make additional money if they also sold lots of different ingredients that could go into their blenders, so Carro connected them to many great companies. The Carro technology wires them together, so the ingredients appear in the Blendjet store. Suddenly, they have a wealth of products to upsell with zero risk.

Carro automates the relationships.

What kind of impact does Carro have?

We have plenty of examples of brands on the Shopify platform doubling their sales by using Carro. Recently, we’re seeing entirely new marketplace stores being built on Carro, so while we started as a partnership network, Carro is rapidly becoming a platform, where the brand depends on Carro to even exist.

How is Carro raising millions in this economy?

Firstly, it’s important to find the right investors, ones that are interested in your specific category. We are, commerce enablement / e-Commerce / commerce marketplaces.

I once met an investor and tried to pitch him, but he stopped me and said, “Sorry, I only invest in Marine Batteries!”, that was my mistake for not doing my research!

Second, you have to make it easy. We created a “Convertible Note” with very good terms for an investor, in this economy they deserve great terms, so nobody is arguing over those.

Finally, if this thing is going to get big, you need to...

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