Our approach
CTB Capital invests in early-stage start-ups that provide Software as a Service Applications (SaaS) to small-to-medium businesses. We don't do consumer applications, we don't do big enterprise installations. In SaaS, we know how to optimise marketing channels, how to design on-boarding processes for SMBs and how to build Customer Success teams. SaaS is what we know. SaaS is what we invest in.
We like to partner with entrepreneurs at the very beginning of their journey, often we are the first money-in along with friends and family. As well as providing seed capital, we also give entrepreneurs access to our international network of contacts to help accelerate growth in our portfolio companies.
Typically, CTB Capital invests ~$100,000 in Pre-Seed investment rounds. For select portfolio companies, we may invest larger amounts in follow-on rounds of funding.
Our Active Role in our Investments
Between the time CTB Capital invests startup funds in a company and the time we exit our investment, we assist companies in a various ways to help them achieve their growth targets. This will ideally result in CTB realizing a profitable return on the investment we make. This is an active advisory service that CTB Capital will be providing to companies on a daily basis to help guide them through the often tricky times of starting a company.
How We Help - Marketing
After each investment, CTB assigns a member of its team to oversee the marketing efforts of the new portfolio company. On a continual basis, this team member will be available onsite to assist portfolio companies in bringing their products to market as quickly and effectively as possible. During This level of engagement continues until the management team have developed a scalable, defined and implemented customer acquisition process. Below are a list of the activities that CTB typically performs for each new investment:
- CTB assists companies in the setup and performance of their digital advertising campaigns – search, social media, display and re-marketing – including architecture and creative execution.
- CTB advises on the technical setup of web properties to insure effective search engine optimization and speed performance, including design and execution of all conversion points. For for the first 2 months post-investment, this is reviewed weekly and results are assessed to ensure that the company’s product is being seen by as many potential customers as possible.
- CTB helps assess the effectiveness of and engagement with content, including SEO, across web properties and social channels, as well as brand positioning and product clarity.
- CTB engages in brand strategy, which includes logo development, style guidelines, and tag & motto development
- We compose reports on different aspects of a company’s digital marketing from advertising architecture through to messaging and technical setup and present it in a report that is easy to digest.
- We then help the company to create a roadmap to address the core problems. We identify those steps and prioritize the fixes that provide immediate value.
- This requires constant monitoring of results, and then adjusting as necessary to ensure that our portfolio companies get the best results from their marketing efforts.
- The roadmap includes having the ability to identify the company's target market and position their product or service offering in a way that will interest customers and make them want to buy.
How We Help - Building the Brand
In the very initial stages after our investment, we will sit down with the portfolio company and help them to define their message. This is achieved by defining the benefits the company’s product will offer to the customer in a clear and concise way.
It is our aim to make each company we invest in a recognized and respected brand in its given industry. We will help achieve this by not only targeting customers who we thing will use the each product, but also customers who will relay positive messages to other potential leads about the quality of the offering.
How We Help - Managing Cash Flow
Cash flow is vital to any business, but it is especially vital in the early stages of a startup. As a first step, CTB helps companies to determine their true break-even point. To identify when a business will become profitable provides the company with many benefits. It shows them where it could potentially trim costs in order to get to this point, it highlights all the inputs that it will take to get the company profitable and it outlines an early goal to strive for.
To do this CTB Capital helps put in place a cash flow worksheet that is essential to keeping the firm disciplined in its early stages. Once this is in place, the company can judge which customers it needs to put pressure on to pay, or offer incentives to pay early.
It is also an important metric for the company to be able to gauge future sales and profits, which will contribute to the next benefit CTB offers, which is to aid future technology development.
How We Help - Further Development of Technology
CTB Capital will draw on its extensive technical experience across many programming languages and tools to help make the company's software offering as effective as possible. All our technical advisory work is led by Drew Proud.
Drew works closely with each portfolio company’s developers to ensure the software product offered is using the most cutting-edge technology available to satisfy the needs of the company’s customers and ensure peak performance.
Drew also assists with database requirements and identify suitable hardware/storage solutions to make sure the company’s service is always online and available.
In the early days, Drew performs some basic QA testing on different iterations of their product to help identify bugs, to see what could be done to make operations run faster and smoother.
