The first marketing budget for Lucidchart was about $100 in ads. Ben Dilts put a prototype online at the end of 2008, wrote to bloggers and waited. He was, by the account in Utah business coverage, a student who had to go back to Brigham Young University to finish his degree.
Something in the product caught. A diagram editor that lived entirely in the browser was not common in 2008. People who hated installing heavy software found they could draw a flowchart and send a link. Lucidchart, LLC was formed in Utah in April 2009.
People who hated installing heavy software found they could draw a flowchart and send a link.
What the prototype lacked was money and a business partner. Dilts found both at a speed-pitching event, where founders rotated through tables of potential investors. There he met Karl Sun, a former Google employee who had spent seven or eight years there, though not, Crunchbase News later corrected, as an engineer. Sun wrote an early cheque. The two formally co-founded Lucid in 2010 and, by these accounts, worked out of Dilts's student apartment on roughly $200,000 from Sun's network.
The next break was distribution. In 2010 Lucidchart landed in the Google Apps Marketplace, putting it in front of companies that already lived in the browser. In 2011 a $1 million seed came from 500 Startups, 2M Companies, K9 Ventures and angels, and the company incorporated in Delaware in January.
Growth stayed in Utah. In October 2018 Meritech, Spectrum Equity and ICONIQ put in $72 million. Lucidspark, a whiteboard, arrived in 2020, just as remote work made whiteboards a battleground. By July 2021 the company was valued at $3 billion, and in April 2022 Karl Sun stepped back to board chair while the long-time operator Dave Grow became CEO.
What the sources leave out is the doubt: nothing found describes how Dilts or Sun felt in the apartment years, so this account will not invent it. What they do show is the stake. A student with a prototype and a $100 ad budget needed a person who believed enough to write a cheque.
The lesson is ordinary and easy to forget. The product got him into the room, but a speed-pitching table got him a partner. Go to the dull events.