NYA FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT ‒ DANIEL SCHINDLER, FOUNDER & CEO BUOY
Daniel Schindler, Founder and CEO of Buoy, started his career as a software consultant for a dealership management company, but quickly pivoted to become an entrepreneur. Daniel pursued his MBA in Entrepreneurship at Washington University, and during his program, he developed the idea of Buoy - a purposefully unfavored blend of electrolytes that could be added into any type of drinks. Daniel assembled a network of pharmaceutical experts, mentors and focus-group participants to turn Buoy from a passion project into a company.
How did you first meet New York Angels?
We reached out to a few different angel groups on Gust, and we connected with Craig Frischling and Kit McQuiston at NYA. After pitching to NYA, Criag and Kit on worked with us on diligence. They were extremely helpful as we were raising the round.
What was the process like for you when you were fundraising?
It was our first round of official fundraising as a company. Previously, I had only raised through friends and family. Craig and Kit shared their insights on what a true due diligence process looks like, and we were then able to take that to many other angels and angel groups to show that our homework had been done. Also, having NYA members supporting us signaled to other investors that Buoy was a worthwhile investment. We are really grateful the for the time and energy that Craig and Kit spent coaching us before we brought the opportunity to other angels, who closed the round for us. We ended up securing a lot more funding than what we were shooting for with the help of NYA.
What have you enjoyed most about working with New York Angels?
NYA members, particularly Craig and Kit, have just really showed that they cared about our company and cared about us as the team. They have given us so much of their time in helping in the investment process and mentoring us to continue to grow. They have advised us on our retail strategy – going into our retail stores to help us improve our presence, and ultimately they guided us through working through some critical pivots to a DTC company, which has resulted in 10x growth over the past 12 months.
Overall, we're really thankful for all the investors, including the New York Angels, for taking the chance on us and having belief in in our product, our brand, our team. We’re thankful for them taking the time to help us grow and ultimately get them the ROI that they're looking for in return.
What advice would you give other founders who are looking to fundraise?
1) Make sure the timing is right for you as a company and you have the right amount of traction to the angels want to see. Start with where you are as a company by asking yourself, “Am I past the family and friends stage of fundraising? Or do I need to do whatever I can to raise little bit more money one way or another before I go into angel groups?” Our experience has been that if you're not ready, you will be ripped apart by investors. It will be a waste of time.
2) Build the right pitch and the right pitch deck to be ready for tough conversations. Fundraising is frustrating. You’ll be on call after call every day, and you’ll be bombarded by question by people who will potentially invest a lot of money. Preparing the right materials ahead of time makes it a lot easier than having holes that you need to cover up or talk through. I was very fortunate to have founders and a supporting team that helped on this process. As I was fundraising, I could focus myself on the pitch itself, while the team helped with all the other assets.
What advice would you give other early-stage investors who are looking to invest in companies?
While I've never been in the position myself to invest, from what I've seen, you want to ask a lot of questions that are more strategic for the stage of the company. Many investors can be caught up in the question, “What is proprietary about your product, processes, or other parts of your business?” That question is almost irrelevant in my opinion, unless you're talking about a specific technology company, but even tech companies have similar competition, like Uber and Lyft. Especially in the very early stages, focus less on what the competitive landscape looks like. Instead, focus on the question, “Does this team have the capability to build a great brand that can that can capture a sufficient part of the market share to make this investment worth it?” At Buoy, we have a slide about defensibility, but the slide is focused on how we’re growing the brand. Could someone with millions of dollars reverse engineer what we do? Of course they could, but by the time that they do, Buoy will already by the market leader because we’ve grown our brand.
What has driven Buoy’s success?
Our team is why Buoy has been successful, and more than anything, our resilient mindset has been the key. We started Buoy 6 years ago, at least in terms of the ideation phase and R&D, and we have pivoted so many different times to get to where we are now. It’s important for a founder and their team to have that resilient mindset do whatever it takes because you're in it for the long haul. You’re not going to be an overnight success, and you're going to learn along the way and need a lot of time to figure things out.
We’ve also been successful because we have focused on spending the time and money to build the brand foundational elements, the product R&D, and our go-to-market strategy in the right way instead of rushing through it. You always want to have a sense of urgency, but it’s much more important to spend the amount of time that it takes to get the product and brand right. Always make sure you have your team right before you invest heavily in the product and marketing.
Finally, our team is continually learning about our customer base and our target market, and our best customers. We’ve been talking to our customers, keeping our ears to the ground, thoroughly reading our reviews for years. We’re constantly identifying how we can make our product better – it’s been through more than 50 iterations since we started. A big piece of this journey is also developing a good sense of how to internalize customer feedback, both good and bad. I think it's easy to get extremely excited or deflated when you see the range of customer reviews. Our Amazon reviews range from: “This saved my grandma’s life” to “This tastes like hot dog juice.” It’s easy to be thrown off by nasty reviews from people who haven’t used your product in the correct way. If you become too focused on them, you can actually lose your sense of direction and some momentum. Everyone will have a different opinion, but you need to be able to aggregate all of that, and then make a decision based off of the 1,000 reviews that you see versus just 1 outlier review.
