I have committed to invest in Mica Vaipan of RunYourself's Pre Seed. Here's why.

I look for:

1. Very strong founders
2. building differentiated products that matter
3. that can scale fast
4. with huge potential markets,
5. a plausible route to market
6. and great unit economics

RunYourself hits all of these hard.

1. Mica is a very strong founder. Super smart, great at explaining what she is doing and why, and a fast learner.

2. RunYourself offers a peer-to-peer coaching program that teaches each participant to be a coach. People hate going on coaching courses and are then left to sink or swim or professional coaches are crazy expensive. RunYourself has evidenced its program works at a price point that means it is affordable.

3. RunYourself will be able to scale fast because it doesn't need to hire coaches to scale. Everything is platform based.

4. There is a huge pent-up demand for coaching that isn't met because of the price point. This solves the problem. How many of your staff would you want to be coached or to learn how to coach their employees if it could be done at £1k per person per year? This will create a market size many orders of magnitude greater than the existing coaching market.

5. Mica is being advised by Amanda Nolen who advises global organisations on how to upskill their staff using tech. She believes this will be easy to sell, organisations are crying out for it, and she knows because it is her job to advise on services like this. Amanda is confident enough that she is taking her adviser fee in equity. I have met Amanda and she is impressive.

6. Because they do not need to hire their own coaches, gross margin is high. Most coaching businesses have low gross margins.

My view on the main risks (there are always more):

1. Human feedback is currently given on each peer-to-peer session. They plan to iteratively reduce the amount of human input required to do this until none is required. They have AI experts working on this now. There is technical risk here.

2. Go to market. While Amanda is confident this will be easy to sell because of the quality of the offering and the price point, this is Pre Seed and until they've started selling you never know.

Raise:

1. Mica is close to closing a £500k ASA from angels and three institutions (including me).

2. She will extend the round for the right investors.

#founders #startups #venturecapital #buildinginpublic #investinginpublic