The SaaS CFO · Ben Murray
podcastplaybook€500K Pre-seed Round to Manage Your Value Chain ESG Impact
Source excerpt
About The SaaS CFOIn this episode of The SaaS CFO Podcast, we welcome Oksana Tolmatshova, co-founder and CEO of Esgrid, a company providing affordable value chain sustainability management tools for medium-sized enterprises and financial institutions. Oksana shares her 20+ year background in banking and fintech, including her experience studying sustainable finance to understand the essential role the financial sector plays in implementing sustainability. Oksana explains how Esgrid solves the problem of the lack of ESG data for small and medium enterprises by streamlining the collection and analysis of this data. Founded in August 2022 by Oksana and 3 other co-founders, Esgrid impressively secured their first paying customer before even writing a line of code for their MVP. The Esgrid platform creates network effects as more companies in a value chain provide their ESG data, making it simple to share with…
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Apollo layer
What a founder can learn
Founder takeaway
Validate the painful workflow before building: Esgrid secured a paying customer before coding its MVP, then designed the product so each participant’s ESG data could make the value-chain network more useful.
Why it matters
Early payment provides stronger evidence of demand than interest alone, while a product that becomes more valuable as customers and their partners contribute data can create compounding adoption and defensibility.