Shift To Consumer Investing

I intend to shift most (not all) of my focus back over to consumer investing in Haystack 3.

In my first fund, it was dominated by consumer. That wasn’t intentional. I was just starting out, I was a dog chasing cars. In my second fund, most of it was consumer, but I started to go a bit deeper into enterprise SaaS and industrial IoT. That exploration led me to start focusing on enterprise and industrial IoT in my third fund, which I’m currently in the middle of. In this current fund, I have focused my investing in two areas so far — enterprise SaaS, security, and infrastructure, and industrial-focused software and robotics. I’m finally able to write more about these so expect some “The Story Behind My Investment In _____…” posts over the next few weeks.

Along this way, in Haystack 3, I have been looking for consumer-focused companies but have ultimately passed on all the opportunities to date. Those were hard decisions, and I’m sure I made some mistakes. So far, in 8-9 months of investing Fund 3, I have only invested in one (1) consumer-facing seed-stage company, and it’s not yet launched and may shift its model to an indirect B2C2B model.

I would like to do more on direct consumer in this fund, and it’s been nagging at me for a while, so I finally wanted to post on it. I do not have a laundry list of categories to hunt down or chase after, and I have a small handful of ideas of where I think interesting consumer behaviors may emerge, but I’d rather see what’s out there and be surprised. Yes, I have thought about areas of consumer spending (insurance, rent/mortgage, self-improvement, health etc.) and consumer attention (VR, AppleTV, apps etc.) and I’ve written about live video and esports and bots… but I would say the pattern I’m looking for is as follows: Something I can experience/test myself or observe others doing; a company which is obsessed about creating and building a direct relationship with a consumer; a team that is obsessive about acquiring customers and users and their CAC numbers; and a team that has a vision for a future on a global scale — doesn’t need to be today, but eventually. A product vision and desired roadmap goes a long way.

I am going to focus on this now more intently and really dig into it over the summer. It’s OK if you’ve already raised a pre-seed or seed or whatever fund. And, I likely won’t make any investment decisions very quickly on this, so am looking to engage more and get to know more people before selecting a few to work with. I’d appreciate it if you could share this with people you like or find interesting in the consumer space, and thank you for reading.