Influencer Funding Beats VCs

A story about how Thrive Market's initial fundraising failure led to unexpected success.

"We spent the better part of the first year self-funding the business, trying to get to the starting line. We tried to raise capital and got rejected by 150+ VCs - our first of many existential crises in the business.

The really fortunate thing that happened was being rejected by so many VCs led us to raise all our initial money from health and wellness influencers. They turned out to be the best promoters of the business. We had about 100+ coalition of the willing on our cap table who were also promoting the business.

About 80% of the influencers came in before we had a dollar of sales. While every VC said no, we had probably a 70-80% close rate with influencers. There were two things that contributed to that: First, they understood the value proposition - that making healthy living affordable matters to millions of people who were their audiences. Second, we had one of my college buddies, John Durant, who was basically a meta-influencer - an influencer to the influencers.

The first influencer that came on board was Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple, then Wellness Mama who became our biggest influencer of all. After that, it was just one after the other. We got very lucky with the right people coming into the business at the right time, and we found people who actually cared about the mission. If we weren't doing it for the right reasons, those influencers wouldn't have come on board.

Looking back, I have to be grateful to those VCs who rejected us because we wouldn't have gone to the influencers had they said yes, and I don't think we would have built the kind of company that we have."