The ability to extend your runway has been hiding in plain sight.
And it’s no one’s fault. Company building has been a maze for individuals and businesses for years. But in a time of crisis, that maze becomes even more paralyzing and disorienting. Do you turn left? When do you speed up? When do you slow down? Questions beget questions, but what if those questions turned into answers? What if there was a map? What if that map held the key to an endless stream of capital — a straight path to that destination…a main street.
MainStreet CEO Doug Ludlow
Funnily enough, the ability to extend one’s runway is a solved problem. It was solved roughly 40 years ago. In 1981, the Economic Recovery Tax Act introduced research and development tax credits, a non-dilutive form of capital to help catalyze innovation. However, that was 1981 and with time, this great product has gone neglected. It’s in desperate need of a resurfacing, but no one has stepped in to give it the attention and time it needs. In 2020, we got those people and their names are Doug Ludlow and Dan Lindquist. Doug and Dan, along with their team, are building MainStreet, the ultimate advocate for startups and small businesses.
To start, MainStreet taps into those billions of dollars allocated to small businesses and reroutes them right to a company’s bank account. MainStreet automates the process for companies to effortlessly discover, apply for, and receive these allocated dollars — dollars that are commonly stowed away in the form of government stimulus funds, hiring incentives, and tax credits. In other words, Doug and his team work as a company’s advocate to ensure that they surface and give you all of the money that is already set aside for them. Let’s take it a step further…MainStreet gives you free money.
MainStreet is designing the front-end and back-end portal for a company to work with its local and federal government. The government says it has your back, but when information is buried, following through on that promise becomes increasingly difficult. With just a few clicks, MainStreet connects to your payroll provider, ingests your company’s information, and magically discovers all of the government dollars that are readily available to you. As opposed to waiting for that cash to hit your account months later, MainStreet gets it to you faster, and monthly, so that you can use that cash to support your business immediately. And MainStreet doesn’t do this just once. The software works 24/7 to constantly surface and discover new credits. You can read more about how it works in this deep dive on MainStreet from Not Boring, which notes the startup is exceeding the revenue growth pace of the top cloud companies.
Your company is dynamic and evolving, and therefore the credits that you are eligible for are as well. On average, the company is finding more than fifty thousand dollars for each company that applies and over time, we fully anticipate that number to grow. To keep incentives fully aligned, MainStreet does not make any money until you do.
After just a few meetings, we knew we wanted to be involved in this journey. Since meeting Doug, we knew that this man was on a mission to support small businesses however he can. From starting several companies before to then working with small businesses inside Google’s SMB ads team, he has experienced the challenges of growing new and small businesses first hand. That said, the passion does not stop with Doug. Every member of the MainStreet team deeply cares about supporting small business with many having started their own.
This is just the beginning for the company. With huge plans in mind for 2021, MainStreet has been leveraging the team at SignalFire to help with product development, PR & communications, recruiting, and strategy planning. We could not be more excited to be leading MainStreet’s $60M Series A with the goal of assisting them to help every entrepreneur push the world forward.
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