From 10 to 100 customers: The power of private channels

How founders and VCs are winning with exclusive communities

Author

Michael Morgenstern
October 22, 2024

Happy Tuesday Brex community,

Tired of getting lost in the noise of LinkedIn and X? The savviest founders and VCs are breaking through by building exclusive WhatsApp groups. They're not just chatting—they're closing deals and raising capital. And by fostering exclusive communities of customers, stakeholders, and peers, they're leaping from 10 to 100 customers faster than those relying on traditional, non-community-led strategies.

We are seeing private channels grow into powerful ecosystems where feedback is instant, relationships are genuine, and opportunities emerge organically. They're proving that building in a gated community can outpace building in public when it comes to traction and product-market fit.

Why Private WhatsApp Groups Are 0 to 1 Accelerators

  • Direct Access: Engage personally with up to 100 members (our ideal #) you know—be they investors, customers, or partners.

  • Shared Obsession: When people passionate about the same problem come together, opportunities compound.

  • High Engagement: Away from cluttered platforms, every conversation is meaningful and action-driven.

  • Curation Marketing is emerging as the game-changer for early-stage growth. By creating and nurturing gated communities around hyper-specific topics, you're not just broadcasting messages—you're fostering meaningful relationships and real-time dialogues that drive action.

For founders aiming to expand their customer base and VCs looking to attract new LPs, this strategy offers direct access to your target audience's thoughts and needs. It's about cultivating a network where ideas are exchanged freely, feedback is immediate, and trust is built organically.

Growing together, Michael Morgenstern

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Jared Shulman and Jerry Shu the Co-Founders of Lendica

Lendica is an AI-powered lender focusing on SMB financing in industrial and specialty trade sectors. Our proprietary AI engine, Lens, leverages a vast amount of real-time financial and operational data to deliver accurate credit decisions. By integrating seamlessly with ERP and SaaS platforms, we provide businesses with fast and fair access to capital. Lendica’s vision is to minimize human intervention in the lending process and become the leader in SMB finance, while extending our AI-powered underwriting technology to enable any institutions to make smarter, data-driven lending decisions at an unprecedented scale and speed.

Ambassador’s Perspective:
Today, even the most sophisticated fintechs require large operations teams to underwrite, originate, and service basic factoring and lending programs. Lendica's AI-enabled underwriting engine, Lens, empowers a modern credit experience by reducing or eliminating human-in-the-loop processes and delivering its customers fair, accurate loan offers in minutes instead of days. Lendica is charting a course to fundamentally change the way industrial businesses, including specialty trade, wholesale, and retail, engage and grow with their financial service providers.

Baiyin Murphy is a General Partner at Indicator Ventures

Indicator Ventures is a pre-Series A firm investing in businesses tackling enterprise, health and finance. We love high conviction, high velocity and high obsession founders who are building generation-defining businesses, so if that’s you and you’re raising pre-seed to seed+ capital, we want to back you! We are writing $750K to $2M checks out of our $50M Fund III and we still have half the fund to invest! Most recently, we invested in Starpath (”gas stations” for the moon); Simply Bail (tech for the bail bond industry); Retrocausal (AI copilot for manufacturing); and RepRally (wholesale commerce tech).

Baiyin is a General Partner at Indicator and resides in Coconut Grove, Miami. Florida is full circle for her as she began her career investing in cybersecurity companies such as Cylance and Resilient Systems at ClearSky (a FL-based VC), then moved to Boston to join OpenView and Ascent before returning to Florida to run Indicator Ventures with her partners. She just welcomed her baby girl into the world and is enjoying playing tennis and getting involved in the Miami art community.

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Don’t hesitate to reach out,🦾!