Here at noah, we’re all about first steps and over the years we’ve taken many of our own. From launching noah in 2018, packing boxes in our storage unit whatever the weather, to growing noah into a 7 figure business through bootstrapping. We are so proud of how far we have come and we’re super excited to announce that we’ve taken some even bigger steps and have raised our first investment. 

It all started last April (2020) when we decided, amidst a global pandemic, that we’d put on our big boy pants and begin looking for investment to enable us to grow and expand the noah brand. Now, I know what you’re thinking “who starts fundraising at the beginning of a global crisis”? Well… we did, and let’s just say it didn’t go quite as well as we’d planned.

So why was this the case? Whilst we have a profitable business model and a vision for the future of noah, our pitch deck focussed only on data and cold numbers. We were also missing a cohesive & appealing brand, so it was time we took a step back so we could look into what noah was really about.

Behind all of the numbers, projections and box ticking, we wanted to better convey our story, the story of why we started noah, why starter kits, and how far we believe we can take our vision of supporting customers' First Steps. So our next challenge was stripping back, refining, and to quote old Boris himself (or was it Biden?), “Build back better” for our next round in Q4 of 2020.                   

Enter Chadd, Head of Brand, storytelling wizard, and ruthless minimalist campaigner. He joined the pitching team to help strip back our presentation, shift the focus from the (all too common) colourless messaging and introduce delight & humour for the intended VC audience. We even took a (soft) jab at the VC world with our not-so-serious Investor Starter Kit just to prove how far the idea can go.

We shared it with dozens of potential investors at the beginning of November (2020) and we were booked up for 2 weeks with an uncountable number of calls with investors walking them through the idea, the pitch deck and our roadmap for 2021. 

The lessons we learnt along the way were invaluable in us successfully raising our very first investment round, and we are very proud to announce in the end we closed a round of £1.4m in just 8 days after engaging with Fuel Venture.

First steps (to investment), covered.