The term sheet valued the company at half what the founder expected, and the board seat was the real deal-breaker.

The Series A term sheet valued the company at half what the founder expected, and the board seat that came with it was the real deal-breaker. The founder walked, and now needs the growth capital anyway, without giving up equity or a seat to get it. They are not calling the VC who just lowballed them. They are searching "revenue based financing" from a coffee shop an hour after the meeting ended.

The equity decision creates the search, not the founder Slack

Founder Slack groups, accelerator alumni lists, and the VC who will not lead the round: that is how RBF firms get introduced today. Those rooms recycle the same names. A founder who is not in the room does not hear about you, and the founder who just walked away from a priced round is rarely in that room at the moment it matters most.

A SaaS or subscription company wants growth capital without giving up equity or a board seat. Repayment is a percentage of revenue until a cap is hit. There is no option pool conversation. There is a revenue series, a churn story, and a multiple, and it is slower than an MCA and faster than a priced equity round.

MCA is a merchant and card volume. Mezzanine is a sponsor and a holding company. RBF is neither. Three different leaves on this hub, three different capital structures entirely.

What a buyer is actually searching

They type revenue based financing, RBF, non-dilutive capital, growth capital without giving up equity. The trigger is a round they do not want, a round they cannot get, or a board they do not want to add. Last month they could wait. This month a hire, a pipeline, or a competitor made waiting expensive.

They are comparing this to a seed extension and to cutting burn, not to a restaurant cash advance. If the ads and the landing page look like MCA, the founder who cares about the cap table leaves immediately.

Founders, accelerators, and VCs are LinkedIn. The founder making the equity-avoidance decision tonight is Google.

Objections we hear

I'll just raise. Then raise. This page is for the founder who already turned that down, or who got turned down.

The cap is expensive. It is priced as a share of revenue, not cheap debt. The real comparison is dilution and control, not a prime rate.

My accelerator will intro someone. They will intro the firms they already know. A founder outside that Slack does not get the intro.

An acquisition can trigger the full cap the day the deal closes

RBF is structured to avoid equity-like features on purpose: a genuine revenue share with a fixed formula generally falls outside the "investment contract" definition that makes something a security under federal law, the test set out in SEC v. Howey. That is exactly why a clean RBF deal has no board seat, no preferred stock, no equity dilution.

What founders miss is the acceleration clause many of these agreements carry. A founder who models the cap as something that pays down gradually over several years of revenue share often has not read the change-of-control provision closely: many RBF agreements require the full remaining cap amount, not just what has already been repaid, the moment the company is acquired or merges. A founder negotiating an exit who has not priced that acceleration into the deal can watch a meaningful slice of the proceeds get paid out at closing that they never modeled.

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Who this is actually for

Firms that actually buy a percentage of recurring revenue, with a revenue floor they can name in underwriting even without publishing it here. The lead worth the spend has revenue that repeats. A services firm with project spikes, and a pre-revenue deck, are usually not that lead.

This page is a poor fit for an MCA firm putting "RBF" on a page to catch a founder query it will then hold against card sales instead. The underwrite here is a forecastable revenue series, recurring, not a one-time spike, and churn and customer concentration matter more than a credit score.

The point of the product, for the founder who searches, is still the cap table: no new board seat, no new preferred, repayment that moves when revenue moves. That has to be on the second screen a visitor sees, not buried in an objection further down the page. A page that leads with "fast cash" attracts the merchant-advance searcher and loses the founder actually protecting the cap table, the entire reason this query is worth buying instead of an MCA query.

How the campaign runs

Google ads for founders and CFOs searching revenue-based financing, not one generic "venture debt" campaign burning spend it was never built to win. Keywords are custom to the industries and revenue profiles a firm actually funds.

Foundational work in parallel: the website, local directories, general search appearance, so the click lands on a firm that reads as capital, not a cash-advance page wearing a different label. A landing page may be included; a full website is quoted separately.

LinkedIn ads aimed at founders, accelerators, and VCs, paid placements and lunch-and-learns, never a message sequence. No InMail. No connection sequences. No DMs. That channel does not run here, under any name.

Why we're not generalists

A generalist agency will not take the time to learn how this practice wins work. The file count is too small and the underwriting mechanics bore them. They want a big budget and a lot of traffic to a thin landing page. We run a tight campaign for a firm that closes fewer files at a higher value. That is the entire point of this page.

Most agencies cannot tell a founder protecting the cap table apart from a merchant chasing fast cash, and the bidding shows it. Revenue cap, dilution, the acceleration clause, that vocabulary has to be on the landing page, not a brochure that could describe any lender in the market.

How fast this can run

Ads can be live in under a week. What slows it down is approval on your side, the keywords, the spend, the revenue profile, the page the click lands on. Directories, bios, and a site a buyer will trust take longer. That trust layer is why the click stays. It is not the same thing as going live on search.

How this is billed

This is Visibility Program work, not the outbound program. You pay ad spend directly to Google and, where it runs, LinkedIn. ROI Wire bills a retainer that scales with that spend, not a flat project fee and not a percentage of closed files.

A landing page may be included at no additional cost. A full website build is always quoted and billed separately. Foundational services, copywriting, directory work, and the reputation surfaces a founder checks before trusting a firm with their cap table sit under this track as the credibility layer, not a correspondence program running in parallel.

What is not included

We do not build a solicitation list of founders. We do not write, mail, or phone CFOs who have not searched or asked. We do not fund the deal ourselves. We make the firm findable. The firm does the work.

This is not MCA or mezzanine. Those are different pages on this hub.