Visible

Mike Proust and his co-founders Eric Christian Anderson and Mike Fitzgerald started Visible in 2014, but not as a typical startup pitch. They built it first as an internal tool within a venture fund, designed to solve a real problem they experienced firsthand: getting timely, accurate updates and data from portfolio companies. Rather than staying locked inside the fund, they recognized the broader market opportunity—every founder raising capital struggles with the same challenge of communicating with investors.

Visible was born out of necessity and built to address investor communication at scale. The product integrates with the tools founders already use—Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Google Analytics, Mixpanel—to automatically consolidate business data and create beautiful, professional investor update reports. Instead of manually pulling data from multiple sources, founders can send polished updates through email, Slack, or shareable links, with analytics tracking how investors engage with them. The founding team operated lean and bootstrapped creatively from the start.

Visible's early traction came entirely through organic channels: organic search, customer referrals, and investor referrals. The co-founders were part of Hi Alpha, an Indianapolis-based accelerator that became the prototype for their model. Their investor and founder network became their distribution channel—people who understood the problem naturally became advocates. By keeping the trial frictionless (14 days, no credit card required) and flexible (automatically extending trials for founders whose investor updates fell outside the trial window), they optimized for activation rather than artificial conversions.

The core insight driving retention was behavioral activation: founders who sent at least one investor update had a 95% chance of becoming paying customers. This became their north star KPI. With 600 out of 2,000 organizations on the platform paying, and less than 2.5% annual revenue churn, the unit economics worked—$150/month ACV with incredibly sticky customers. However, the biggest risk remained early-stage company churn when founders weren't actively fundraising. To mitigate this, the team stayed hands-on with customers, proactively checking if someone hadn't sent an update in a while and offering help. Only recently have they started experimenting with paid acquisition, keeping budgets conservative ($400 to $2,000/month) while they figure out the paid marketing playbook.

Visible just crossed $1M ARR with 200% year-over-year growth, all while maintaining healthy unit economics and a 5-person distributed team based in Chicago, Dublin, Indianapolis, and beyond. The team is hiring for a full-stack engineer and a demand generation marketer—the first professional marketer to join the company. Expansion revenue is starting to lift after a recent pricing restructure. Proust is thinking bigger about the investor relationship lifecycle: not just retention and engagement, but acquisition and nurturing of new investor relationships. He's also exploring financing options beyond equity, having used Lighter Capital's recurring revenue loan product to finance the business (a 15-day close from engagement to wire transfer). While he'd consider raising another $1-2M to avoid over-dilution, the business is self-sustaining and capital-efficient by design.