6. Fundability
6.1 Would I invest at pre-seed or seed?
Pre-seed: No. Not as described, and not as the wedge either.
- As described: "a data-feed API for some niche dataset" is a category, not a company. The named datasets are free or owned.
- As the wedge: India business days is a real gap, but the whole market is estimated at $0.6–6M a year (02). Even a dominant position doesn't return a fund.
I'd only look at it as part of something bigger: a founder with a plan to own Indian financial reference data (holidays, cut-offs, settlement calendars, filing deadlines, reference rates, IFSC/branch data) for every fintech, banks included, with proof that 50+ regulated firms pay. That's a different business, with an enterprise sales team.
Seed: No. There's nothing to measure yet.
6.2 What a skeptical investor says in the first five minutes
- "RBI publishes this for free. Why would anyone pay you?"
- "python-holidays is MIT-licensed and covers India. What stops someone adding RBI holidays to it next month?"
- "NPCI already shifts NACH debits to the next working day. What breaks for a lender if they get a holiday wrong?"
- "How many Indian firms need this, and how many already have it in a config file?"
- "What happens the first time you miss a holiday declared on a Sunday night?"
- "Your ARPA is under $60. How many customers does $1M ARR need?" (About 1,400. The estimated pool is 2,000–5,000.)
- "Why not just build this inside a payments company? Why is it a standalone business?"
- "Copp Clark has done this since 1841. What do you have that they don't?"
- "Is this a product or a feature of Razorpay, Perfios or a core banking vendor?"
- "Why this founder?"
If you can't answer 1, 3 and 5 crisply, the rest doesn't matter.
6.3 Three proof points that would flip my answer (to a small angel cheque, not a fund)
| # | Proof point | Threshold | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Regulated buyers pay | ≥30 paying RBI- or SEBI-regulated firms, ≥$80 ARPA, ≥95% month-6 logo retention | Proves it's a painkiller for firms that don't disappear. |
| 2 | Freshness is measurable and better | A public log showing median notice-to-webhook under 2 hours, zero missed changes over 12 months, and at least 3 cases where you published before the competitors | Turns "a list" into "a service". It's the only moat. |
| 3 | A second line with the same shape sells | ≥20 paying customers for a second calendar (cut-off times or filing deadlines) without a second founder | Shows it can become an Indian reference-data company, not a single list. |
6.4 Bootstrap or raise?
Bootstrap. There's no real alternative, and it doesn't need one.
- Build cost is tiny. Scrapers, a versioned table, a small API, webhooks. 4–6 weeks at ~15 hrs/week for v1. Hosting under $60 a month.
- Revenue can start in week 3 with a hand-checked file and alerts.
- The main cost is attention, not money. Money can't buy the weekend checking routine early on, only a backup person, and that costs ₹15–25k a month.
- No investor funds this category at this size. Asking wastes the hours you need for sales calls.
- Exit route: small data APIs do get bought. apilayer (fixer, ipstack) went to Idera in Jan 2021. Acquire.com's median is 3.9x annual profit. A clean $3–5k MRR API with low churn is a sellable asset.
Honest bottom line: as described, this is neither fundable nor worth bootstrapping, because the data is free. The narrow version is worth bootstrapping only if the kill test passes. Its best case is a small, durable, sellable business, not a company that raises.