Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephane Nasser. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Stephane, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

OpenVC started as a side project. In 2021, I started playing with Airtable to create a VC database, and my cofounder Lucas created a simple user interface that allowed anyone to add or edit the data. At the time, it was truly a random initiative – there was zero product vision or business plan. Just a passion project.

We launched on ProductHunt on March 11, 2021 and it blew up: OpenVC was voted Product of the Day, then Product of the Month! This encouraged us to dig deeper and build a proper product.

In the next 2 years, we experimented a lot. We had tons of feature requests, but a lot of conflicting directins between what founders want and what investors want. We had to grow a two-sided marketplace while having no income or funding whatsoever. And we knew we were building in a cash-poor space. So we kept our costs to the minimum and bootstrapped for 2+ years while freelancing on the side.

Eventually, we reached the point where OpenVC was good enough that people would pay for it. :)

Since then we went full-time and are now happily growing.

Stephane, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Sure. OpenVC helps tech founders find the right investors.

Let’s say you’re launching a biotech startup in the US. Or a SaaS startup in Germany. Whatever your industry and your geography, you probably need to raise capital.

That’s when we jump in. Today, you can just go to OpenVC and browse 1,000s of relevant, active investors. What’s really cool is that we don’t charge any fixed fee or success fee. The platform is free to use. We just offer a Premium membership, a simple subscription for users who want advanced features. That’s it.

Our #1 mission is helping founders access capital. Therefore, our core product is our fundraising suite, including an investor list, a fundraising CRM, a deck hosting solution, all integrated in one smooth experience.

On top of that, we also provide founders with detailed tutorials and playbooks, for example “how to value your startup” or “how to build your pitch deck”. This is extremely valuable for first-time founders who’ve never raised funding before.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Believe it or not, I actually met my co-founder on Facebook!

I think we can all agree that Facebook sucks, and I haven’t used it for a long time now. However, I still log in once in a while to check a specific group “French startups” that is extremely high-quality. That’s literally the only reason why I still have an account there.

Well, when I started with OpenVC, I did my usual thing and left a post on that one Facebook group, not thinking much of it. Lo and behold, the first comment was from this “Lucas” guy, who I had never spoken with, and who wanted to help.

Fast forward 3 years, and we are now business partners and running OpenVC together.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media is key for us – most of our traffic and users come from Linkedin and Twitter.

Social media gurus typically recommend posting X times per day, scheduling and automating a lot of your posts, etc.

That’s probably true, but for us, we took a different approach. I do my best to post unique content that I believe provide high value to our followers. For example, I can spend 20 min crunching numbers on a spreadsheet to come up with a unique insight and a graph supporting it. Or I can record a video demo showing people how to do something.

I also use social media post to test new content ideas. If it’s successful, then I’ll turn it into a full-fledged blog post.

It is a lot of work, but definitely more human and personal than high-volume templated posts. In the long-term, I believe it pays off in how people perceive you and your brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: openvc.app
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanenasser/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephNass
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvX-CsdLYq-JPbbHs5h9k1A