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When you start building a new business, you’re typically excited. New ventures are full of promise and optimism. You have this idea of how to make something that is meaningful or valuable, and it’s important enough to you that you commit to focusing on it for years to come. We have long believed that you should have a technology partner that is just as committed as you are.

That’s why we started Twin Sun. Starting a business is hard enough without having to worry about the technology behind it. We work with clients we’re excited about, because we want meaningful work for ourselves.

Twin Sun is primarily a software development services business. Traditionally, billing clients for the time we work on their apps has made up the vast majority of our revenue. But lately, more and more frequently, we find ourselves saying “we wish we were a bigger part of our clients’ businesses.”

So that’s what we’re doing. We have invested in a few clients over the years, but this past year we committed to upping the ante. As of this writing, we have four clients in active development who have accepted investment from Twin Sun.

These investment deals are all unique, and we aren’t always the right investor for every client. But we’ve decided to say yes whenever the opportunity is a good fit. Below are the major reasons we’ve been investing more.

Investing demonstrates our confidence in our clients

Nothing says confidence like putting your money where your mouth is. When we offer investment, we are doing exactly that. Our clients know we believe in them and their business when we offer an equity deal.

Investment makes more robust products

Our investment deals typically involve some combination of discounts or development credit, decreasing the cost of our software development services. This extended budget translates into more features you can squeeze into the first few releases of your app.

Extending runways for our client partners

Startups are often constrained by their budgets, and custom software development is not cheap. Our investment has helped several startups extend their runway. Money that may have otherwise been earmarked for building a minimal viable product (MVP) can instead go toward advertising and marketing.

Many startups overlook the sometimes difficult tasks of marketing and selling their product. We encourage our client partners to use their extended runway on new customer acquisition. After all, what good is the product if no one uses it?

Investing demonstrates our passion for the idea

We want to help our clients maintain their level of excitement for the business. In a way, investment is an important motivator for a lot of startups. You get to see that we’re big enough believers in you and your business that we’re willing to buy in.

Investors are good accountability partners

Buying in adds something new to our relationship. We act as a point of accountability for you. Our regular check-ins throughout a project become touch points for updates on your business as well.

Accountability is important, especially in single-founder startups. Discussing your progress with an invested party helps sole founders maintain focus and achieve their goals.

We are motivated to share our resources

When we invest in your app, we’ve made a big commitment to ourselves. In whatever form investment takes, we are giving you money to build something we all believe in. To recoup that investment, we want to do everything in our power to help you succeed.

That means we’ll make introductions to our network. When it makes sense, we’ll connect you to personal and professional contacts. These contacts offer invaluable advice, connections to potential customers, and potential introductions to additional investors.

Having run our own business since 2017, we have a list of incredible contacts that can help you with your own business. If you need a vendor for some other aspect of your business, we can likely direct you to someone or offer advice on selecting the right vendor.

We’ve also assisted with various tasks to help our client partners succeed. We’ve designed promotional materials, built marketing sites, helped with search engine optimization (SEO), and more.

Equity partnerships serve our long-term goals

Naturally, when we invest, we are hoping for a return on investment. Consider our typical services business: we exchange time for money. That means our business, like most professional services companies, has linear growth potential.

We recognized this when starting Twin Sun. It led to plenty of discussion about the type of business we wanted to be. Did we want to seek out ever-increasing revenue from services, requiring continuous growth of our team? No, not really. We’ve been down that path before in earlier jobs in our careers and knew the headaches that come with a massive professional services team.

These discussions eventually led us to ask what can we do to build a resilient and profitable business without growing a massive team. The answer is creating revenue streams that do not require the one-for-one exchange of time for money. Put in those terms, investing in clients for equity makes a lot of sense.

We succeed when you succeed. So let’s make sure that we set you up to succeed.

Are you seeking an investor and technology partner?

Are you starting that exciting new journey of entrepreneurship? Whether it’s your first business or your tenth, we’d love to talk to you about working together. Contact us to start the discussion, and we’ll find what makes sense for each of us.