TURN YOUR IDEA OR SIDE PROJECT INTO A MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS ZeroPoint Ventures provides early-stage funding, evidence-based coaching, & a clear pathway for software entrepreneurs to build a $1MM+ revenue business within 2 years. Our programme is delivered virtually, with one-on-one coaching by experienced startup mentors as you collect evidence of a business worth building.
RATIONALE We ve worked with over 600 early-stage startups in New Zealand, and too many of them start with an idea for a product that they think people want, without spending time fully validating that is the case before they run out of money. We provide a clearer pathway to derisk the startup journey, with evidence-based milestones along the way to help you find and build the right product your market needs, based on clear proof points throughout. turn 20-30x to investors, an approach which rarely works in our experience. Whilst there s nothing inherently wrong with taking venture capital, we believe that this type of thinking (all or nothing moonshots to maximise shareholder value) isn t a fit for everyone. We believe there s a big grey area in between building a lifestyle business and a venture-backed moonshot; one which is a better fit for entrepreneurs in New Zealand. Our goal, instead, is to help your first step be to a meaningful revenue milestone ($1MM annual revenues), rather than an investment milestone, to give you optionality over how you grow in future. lifestyle business Traditional startup investment models push you to go hard and fast searching for a big exit to reventure-backed moonshot WHO WE RE LOOKING FOR? We re looking for people at the early idea stage, who want to build a software product business selling to other small businesses. Those who want to fill a big need based on their own personal experience working in an industry or domain. Ideally you will have a way of currently supporting yourself (e.g. full or part-time work) whilst working on the early stages of your venture, but with a view to moving into this venture full-time and recruiting a small team as you validate- and build- an opportunity worth pursing. Have solid experience or industry knowledge in venture domain Have experienced themselves the problem they want to solve Wants to build a venture with a clear purpose other than just $$ Is at the idea or very early prototype stage Has not raised significant external funding Wants to build a B2B software product business
OUR OFFERING Capability Capital Coaching We have developed a structured offering to help build your entrepreneurial capability, provide you with just enough capital to succeed (assuming you find a venture worth building), and to provide experienced support to see you through the journey to becoming a million dollar company. Our support comprises four main elements: 1. An online guided platform to help you manage venture progress, capability, and milestones; 2. Evidence-driven seed funding to help fill the cashflow shortfall gaps you ll have along the way; 3. One-on-one objective coaching with an experienced startup mentor to keep you accountable; and 4. Access to peer support through an online community of other ZeroPoint-minded ventures. MILESTONE-DRIVEN PROGRESS Our online platform breaks down the steps of building a purposeful, sustainable venture into a series of manageable milestones. The real unit of progress in a startup is learning what the right business model and product is that the market needs; that s why we base our milestones on you having collected evidence and insight towards those learning goals. Our journey starts with inspecting your attributes as a founder and tests whether you re working on the right idea. We then help you identify early customers to prove there s a problem worth solving; get the right prototypes in front of them to prove you re solving it in their eyes; before completing that validation step by testing their willingness to pay. Once you ve built the right product and have early customers onboard, we help you optimise the right channels, acquisition, and conversion funnels, to build a growth engine that can take you to $1MM within the next 18 months. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Proof of Domain/Idea Proof of Problem Proof of Solution Proof of Monetisation Proof of Market Proof of Scale
GUIDED PLATFORM 0.App - our guided venture building platform CAPABILITY BUILDING With so much information out there to help new entrepreneurs, it s often hard to figure out where to start, At each stage, we provide our insights and links to relevant educational content, not only helping you build your venture, but helping you understand concepts like pricing, market validation, financials, and growth. These videos and links also set the stage for the proof you need to make it through each stage of venture growth. ONE-ON-ONE COACHING Throughout our programmes, we supplement self-guided activities with one-on-one coaching. This provides you an objective sounding board to test real progress towards each venture milestone and cross reference your insights with a neutral party. Our coaching is designed to provide pace and intensity by making you accountable to an external party who can help you decide when you ve collected enough evidence to progress further. GUIDED ACTIVITIES To support each stage, a set of guided activities are provided as worksheets to help your thinking and collect evidence required at each point. These activities could be primary research in the early days, through to interviewing customers, designing prototypes, and optimising growth funnels at later stages. Activities are self-guided, some one-off and many requiring iteration as you learn, ASSESSMENT At the end of each stage, your coach will review all of your collated evidence in preparation for a external panel to approve you to the next stage. Building ventures is never a linear process, and often our assumptions on market need are invalidated, so our coaches will help you decide whether to persevere with the current direction, or pivot to a new approach based on your evidence.
OUR PROGRAMME SUPPORT Our support is delivered over a series of incremental programmes, each with defined start & end dates, and with specific success criteria marked by evidence goals. We run a competitive selection process for programme entry and form a starting cohort of the most promising successful applicants. COMMUNITY ACCESS We invite those companies which we do not have capacity to work with directly, to self-guide themselves through our online evidence-based process; with peer support provided through our online community; and with limited online-only access to our mentors and coaches. INCUBATION Our first incubation stage helps you to validate your market opportunity, customer pain points, and ensure you re working on a problem your customers must-have solved. You don t need to make a full-time commitment during this phase of customer -discovery and -development. ACCELERATION Our follow-on acceleration programme assists you to turn your validated concept into a refined set of minimum viable product tests and ultimately an early product which can create and capture value through monetised active usage (targetting $1,000 monthly recurring revenues). GROWTH INCUBATION Next our coaches help you set up a successful growth framework to optimise your product s onboarding, long-term retention ( stickiness ), and virality, allowing you to prepare your platform for onward growth. This stage aims to help you scale revenues to $20,000 per month. GROWTH ACCELERATION Our final growth acceleration stage, assists you to differentiate your product in the market, with strong virality and active engagement, ultimately helping you develop repeatable, sustainable, and cost-effective growth to reach $1MM in annual revenues. At this point, our mission is complete and we help you plan for logical next steps post our support. HOW DO OUR PROGRAMMES WORK? Our programmes are run virtually, with regular group check-ins with your cohort of peers, alongside 1:1 check-ins with your assigned venture coach, and programme mentor. The commitment required is around 4 hrs per week. We also curate the best national and international speakers to share knowledge, best practice, and lite mentoring with you throughout the journey; as you share your own learnings to give back and support your peer group. As you collect evidence, you will be required to present to an external evidence panel at the end of each programme stage to assess your advancement to the next step, and to give you an objective checkpoint of progress.
COST & INVESTMENT MODEL Your Risk Our Risk Our Investors Risk We ve designed a cost-model that gives you optionality over how much risk you want to take: either you take the risk; we take the risk; or our investors take the risk, depending upon which fits your circumstances best. If you are happy to source seed capital yourself, and can pay for coaching, we offer a simple paid coaching service to complement the stages in our model. However, if you want us to assume the risk on our coaching, we offer a deferred-cost model whereby our coaching fees (at $150+GST per hour) are only repayable if and when you reach $1MM in annualized revenues. We invest this time on a 5X return multiple to reflect the early risk we take by offering no up-front cost. You will still need to source and prove you have the required seed capital to progress through the programme though! Up to $170K of seed funding is offered (to our programme participants only), which allows us to remove most of the risk on the ventures side in exchange for future success fees. In this model, both us, and our investors, assume the risk, but similarly we expect a 5X premium on our time and money to cover our loss on ventures that don t make it to $1MM, and to provide a fair return to our investors. In both deferred models, the debt is only repayable when you hit $1MM annualized revenues; as a 20% revenue-share until repaid in full. We have developed a model of venture growth that should allow you to maintain operational costs and growth, whilst making these repayments. Startups do fail, so if your company does not reach $1MM in annual revenues, there is nothing to repay in our deferred models. If you take equity investment before our debt is repaid, thus changing to a more exit-focussed strategy, we reserve an option to convert the value of our investment to equity at a discounted rate to ensure an adequate return for our investors in taking such early risk. Because we are investing debt, we do not take equity in your venture - we prefer a founder-friendly approach whereby you maintain control and ownership over your company. Note: we don t require personal security, but may register an interest over your company assets until our debt is repaid. Our approach to seed funding is a little different to traditional angel investors or venture capitalists. Rather than giving you all of the funding up-front and then pushing you hard to spend it quickly on growth, we instead tie it closely to the evidence you re collecting to prove to both of us that you re building a viable business worth continuing to invest in knowing when not to put more time or money into a venture is just as important as knowing when you should. Ultimately you should only need a fixed amount of our seed funding, as you ll eventually be generating your own revenues. Our funding, therefore, primarily helps you cover the cashflow shortfalls on your way to $1MM in a structured way.
OUR PROGRAMME TEAM AND VENTURE COACHES Our team includes a diverse mix of startup founders, experienced incubator managers and venture capital investment professionals. We don t just know the theory of entrepreneurship - we ve built successful high-scale internet ventures and world-class startup acceleration programmes from the ground up! We ve also worked closely with- and mentored- over 600 New Zealand entrepreneurs through Startup Weekend, Lightning Lab, Young Enterprise, and other direct engagements. In total, we ve helped our companies raise over $4MM+ of private investment for their ventures and seen some of those reach successful financial exits. Dan Khan, Founder & CEO Built SmartGroups.com, Europe's largest pre-facebook social network, sold to the UK s largest ISP for $100MM; Co-founded online jeweller, 1791 Diamonds with $8MM+ revenues; Launched StartupWeekend in NZ (the world s largest entrepreneurial education event); Designed and led NZ's top startup accelerator, Lightning Lab, accelerating over 60 ventures to investment. Justin Douche, Programme Lead Experienced programme and change manager with a focus on people, leadership and culture, bringing global SME & corporate experience, top-tier MBA training and lessons from African innovation, Justin is a regular startup mentor and supporter of growing future leaders in NZ. Sarah Day, Ventures Lead Senior analyst, advisor & intrapreneur in central government. Sarah's been a participant in the R9 GovTech accelerator, and coordinates many of the startup events in Wellington including mentoring at- and organizing- Startup Weekend, FounderCon, and Global Entrepreneurship Week. Lenz Gschwendtner, Mentor Lead Founder of consulting agency Springtimesoft, & co-founder of iwantmyname, a global domain name industry player. Lenz mentors startups at any stage of development and helps drive many industry activities that help grow a better startup community worldwide. Peter Thomson, Venture Capital Lead Specialist in product development, digital marketing, & equity crowdfunding & venture capital having worked at Snowball Effect in NZ, SeedInvest in New York, and Seedrs in London. Peter helps early-stage entrepreneurs get started as a regular mentor for Startup Weekend in NZ. Jane Treadwell-Hoye, Corporate Partnership & Innovation Lead Global leader with a focus on strategy, marketing and customer experience. Jane's operated across the commercial, govt & nonprofit landscapes, coaching teams on innovative, strategic approaches to customer-inspired thinking and people-centric change. Pauli Sosa, Community Lead Event organiser, entrepreneur and startup connector. Pauli has years of experience working with founders and startup programmes across Argentina and New Zealand, including Lightning Lab. She is co-founder of MUV Events, organiser, & global facilitator at Startup Weekend.
To get started on your ZeroPoint journey visit www.zeropoint.ventures and apply to join our programme today. DISCLAIMER The investment, services, products and any opinions, views or recommendations made or referred to in this document are provided for general information purposes only. To the extent that any such information, opinions, views and recommendations constitute advice, they do not take into account any person s particular financial situation or goals and, accordingly, do not constitute personalised financial advice under the Financial Advisers Act 2008, nor do they constitute advice of a legal, tax, accounting or other nature to any person. We therefore recommend that readers seek advice from their usual adviser before taking any action. Whilst we aim to raise your odds of success, no elements in this document, whether express or implied, are to be construed as any guarantee that you will find and build a successful $1MM revenue business - startups operate in an environment of extreme uncertainty, and have a large chance of failing due to a number of internal and external factors. Before taking investment or beginning the programme, you should make yourself aware of- and be comfortable with- the inherent risks in taking outside funding and your chances of success. 2017 ZeroPoint Ventures Limited, All Rights Reserved