Venture Capital SaaS: Two Teens Raised From Calacanis

Most venture capital SaaS stories start in Silicon Valley with decades of experience. Liam Gerada did it at 19 from a small island in the Mediterranean - with zero coding skills and a brother who was still a teenager.

In this episode, Liam reveals how he and his brother Travis built Krepling, a Shopify competitor, from scratch after their own e-commerce struggles. He shares the venture capital SaaS journey that took them from losing every user when they introduced pricing to landing 500 customers and a pre-seed round from Jason Calacanis' LAUNCH accelerator. Their SaaS fundraising success came from traction, not pitch decks.

Krepling's startup funding story proves that raising from VCs requires real customer traction. The brothers reached 500 paying customers and $1 billion in platform GMV before any investor took them seriously - overcoming the skepticism of being teen founders from Malta.

Key Lessons

• 🚀 Venture capital SaaS funding requires traction, not just a pitch: Krepling raised from LAUNCH accelerator only after reaching 500 customers and $1B platform GMV - proving that even teenage founders can secure funding with real traction.
• 📉 Switching from free to paid will expose product gaps: Krepling lost every user when they started charging, but the founders treated it as a signal to improve the product rather than reverting to free.
• 🎯 Agency partnerships accelerate customer acquisition without paid ads: E-commerce agencies frustrated with Shopify integrations started building client sites on Krepling, creating a word-of-mouth engine at zero cost.
• 🛠️ Non-technical founders can build MVPs with minimal coding skills: Travis learned just enough coding to build Krepling's first version, and they hired real developers only after validating demand with paying customers.
• 🤝 Community-driven growth starts with grassroots hustle: Posting on Quora, Reddit, and sending cold emails got Krepling's first 10 customers - enough to prove the concept before approaching venture capital SaaS investors.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Liam's motivations and working with his brother Travis
• What Krepling does and how it competes with Shopify
• How Krepling differentiates from Shopify and BigCommerce
• Business size: 500 customers and $1B+ platform GMV
• From Shopify store to agency idea to building a platform
• Building the MVP without coding experience
• Launching a free product and attracting early users
• Every user churned when pricing was introduced
• How Krepling centralized e-commerce integrations
• The no-code approach to third-party integrations
• Getting the first 10 paying customers
• Agency partnerships as a growth channel
• Raising venture capital SaaS funding from Jason Calacanis' LAUNCH
• Hiring the first developer as non-technical founders
• Lightning Round
• Where to find Krepling and Liam

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/295
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email