Mayfield associate Navin Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra met all the way in which again in 2003, effectively earlier than Poshmark was even a glimmer in his eye. They stayed linked through the years, by means of Chandra’s sale of his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left.
At a breakfast one morning, Chandra instructed Chaddha he was going to attempt to do all the things from his iPhone for the following six months.
Over the course of that point, the concept for Poshmark began to percolate into one thing extra concrete. Chandra, following Kaboodle, knew he needed to do a number of issues in another way. The first was create an engagement and income mannequin that was symbiotic, moderately than beginning with engagement and having to construct out a enterprise mannequin later. He additionally knew he needed to begin with individuals first, and construct a founding workforce that had deep DNA within the style world to pair together with his technical background.
He met Tracy Sun, introduced her on, and set to work.
This was again in 2011, and Chandra was completely adamant that he needed Poshmark to be an app, not a web site. So adamant, actually, that in beta he truly supplied 100 customers with video iPods. (He recalled that he solely obtained 20% of them again.)
“Lead with love, and the money comes.” It’s one of many cornerstone values at Poshmark. The firm practiced that early on by holding IRL, and then digital, events, permitting customers to indicate one another their wares and create an engagement cycle that provided on the spot gratification. The consumer base grew from 100 to 150 to 1,000 and so on.
“We still to this day use a similar kind of strategy in a much more compressed timeframe as we go to different countries,” mentioned Chandra. “We focus on building the community first and then scale that community.”
Chaddha and Mayfield led the corporate’s Series A deal a decade in the past. On the most recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Chandra and Chaddha sat down with us and walked us by means of that authentic Series A pitch deck (which you’ll take a look at under). They additionally participated within the Pitch Deck Teardown, giving their skilled suggestions on decks submitted by the viewers. If you’d like your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.
Poshmark’s Series A Deck
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Poshmark was constructed on a pair elementary premises. The first was that the iPhone would rework the way in which we do nearly all the things. The second was extra pointed: That style, on the time underserved by expertise, was a discovery course of over a direct search course of. A decade in the past, Chandra envisioned a style market that mimicked procuring in the actual world — stroll into a store and let pure attraction do its factor — with out holding any stock.
