Given the current economic situation, this may be the most challenging time for fundraising.
The pandemic has shut down the economy; it had an equal financial impact on small businesses and large corporations. Understandably, there was widespread fear that investor interest and deal activities would stop.

Counterintuitive, venture capital didn't dry up.
Investors know that some of the very best companies were launched during disruptive times.

But, what exactly is the secret of successful fundraising during the pandemic?
To answer that question, we've interviewed our latest client and founder of Treblle, Vedran Cindric. He recently secured a 1.2M EUR seed investment for his new company Treblle, led by Nauta Capital.

Treblle is software tool that makes it easy to understand what's going on with APIs and the apps
that use them. As a result, it saves developers and companies time and money in every stage of the API lifecycle, from development to post-production.

1. What was your vision for Treblle at the beginning?
The vision at first was a bit selfish : ) I essentially built Treblle to help save myself some time daily. We worked a lot on various apps and APIs as part of our development agency. I was spending a lot of time on things that had nothing to do with development. To free up some time, I built an early version of Treblle that allowed everyone to see what API requests they were making. Once I saw how it helped all of us, we decided to build on top of that. The vision I started with was all about bringing API requests into the light. The fundamental idea about Treblle is really simple but yet so powerful. Once we had access to all the requests, everything else just followed, and we started building features on top of that and shaping the vision.

2. What kind of value does Treblle create for the customers?
It's super simple. It saves you and your team a ton of time and money daily when working with APIs. When you add Treblle, writing and updating documentation is a thing of the past. You don't have to spend any time on that as a developer. Debugging non-code-related errors goes down from hours to minutes. Searching and finding what happened with a given user, device, or something is done in minutes. You also have access to real-time data, which allows you to react and change things before it's too late.

3. Would you please tell us a bit about the struggles?
I have spent a decade developing apps, websites, and APIs, and that's why I didn't have the usual development problems, but this is a very technical product. We did run into scalability and performance issues. I actually dropped the project twice because I couldn't figure those things out. But when I finally figured it out, I never stopped working on it. Besides technical challenges, I think doubt was the biggest struggle: If the product is good enough, will people like it, use it, and similar.

4. What do you believe is your key to success?
The moment I started organizing myself and creating tasks for even the smallest things in Trello, I was able to pick up the pace. So I would say that having a great tool to keep yourself in check and in the "closing tasks" mode was important. Liking what you do is really important. Because to build great products, you have to spend the time taking care of everything from the minor details to the big picture stuff. That involves a lot of actual time spent on development, thinking, and planning. I used to develop Treblle even when I took some time off. I would play games with my friends, usually CS GO or Warzone, and when I die in the game I would have my laptop next to me, and I would develop while I wait for the next round.

5. What are the main things you will invest in with the money you have raised?
People. Simple as that. We are looking for people who love what they do and can help us scale things on all fronts: development, marking, and sales.

6. What is your number one tip you'd like to share with people looking for investments?
Find something you are passionate about, build a product around that, and you won't have to look for investments. Instead, investments will come to you.

You can read more tips on fundraising from our innovation consultants here.