Building a creator-economy startup in 2023 looks much different than in 2021, when Throne, a creator gifting platform, launched.
“We knew that the music that was playing back in early 2022 would eventually stop,” Throne cofounder Leonhard Soenke told Business Insider. “Which has really come to the detriment of a lot of founders who got coaxed into raising a lot more than they needed.”
Throne, in contrast, has worked to keep its funding model lean.
Cofounded by Soenke, Patrice Becker, and Heiner Stinner, Throne launched in late 2021 and told BI it currently employs about 40 staffers across offices in New York, Dallas, and Berlin.
“We provide a wishlist solution for creators, much like the Amazon wishlist where creators can list items they want, and then their fans and their communities can basically crowdfund these items or buy them outright for the creator,” Soenke said.
After Throne hit its first $1 million in gross merchandise value at the end of 2021, Soenke and his cofounders decided it would be a good time to raise so that they could grow the team.
But the team didn’t start with a pitch deck. Instead, they kept it simple with a bulleted email.
“We basically threw it together in an afternoon,” Soenke said.
The team had been introduced over email to a potential investor, so they wanted to move quickly. The email included a link to the website, the startup’s growth thus far, and breaking down what Throne’s vision was and what problem it was solving.
In early 2022, the startup closed its first and only fundraising round at $830,000.
Throne shared the exact email it sent to an investor with BI, which you can read below.
Why Throne is focused on bootstrapping instead of chasing after VC funds
While some creator-economy startups have announced flashy, multimillion-dollar VC funding rounds, Throne “purposefully kept the round very small back then,” Soenke said.
Soenke isn’t shy about what it’s like to be a founder in the creator economy amid a slower funding year that has included startups laying off staff and fire sales.
“There’s a huge amount of pressure on a lot of founders in the creator economy as funding has dried up because they’ve built up that cost basis where they need to raise again,” he said.
Throne’s team has decided to not pursue another VC round and instead is opting to bootstrap for the foreseeable future, Soenke said. He also told BI that Throne has rejected low 8-figure round offers from VCs and that the company is currently profitable.
Soenke said there is still “a lot of pessimism” in the space, but some “disciplined” startups — and he included Throne in this group — are lucky.
Read the email template Throne’s founding team sent to investors like the Weekend Fund, Cory Levy of Z Fellows, and Vibhu Norby of B8ta to raise its $830,000 seed round:
Hey [Redacted],
We do not currently have a deck as we’ve been focused on building the company and didn’t originally plan to fundraise as we are profitable + growing quickly. We’ll put together a deck in the next few days. We can explain most things in the call but here is a good summary:
All the best,
Leonhard
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