Allobee: When Funding Dried Up in 2022, a $500K-Revenue Business Found Its Buyer Through One Mass Email to Its Network

(Dollar figures include a rough conversion at ¥150 to $1 in parentheses.)

When the fundraising window closes, a business doesn’t have many options left. What Allobee founder Brooke Markevicius did was send an email — not to a list of investors, but to her own network. One of the few who replied was Amy Sterner Nelson, founder of The Riveter. The conversation that began in October 2022 progressed to a close before the year was out, and Allobee was brought in, team and all, by the buyer. It landed at a scale of over $500,000 in annual revenue, $500,000 in total funding raised, a 30,000-person email list, and, on the platform, 300 freelancers and 200 client companies.

Numbers and timeline

On the founding year: the article’s body states it started in 2018 and was bootstrapped in its first year, while the deal summary lists 2019 as the founding year. Both are noted here.

Whose problem was this solving

Markevicius was an early employee at Postmates. After leaving to freelance following the birth of her daughter, she came to feel firsthand that startup culture didn’t offer working parents enough flexibility. At the same time, she noticed demand for vetted, trustworthy freelance talent. Allobee put both of these on a single platform.

The difference from massive platforms like Upwork or Fiverr came down to ‘curation’ and ‘pricing.’ Rather than accepting unlimited sign-ups, it screened who joined, and it took on the burden of pricing on the operator’s side. Markevicius explains the reasoning this way: ‘We found that a lot of times, women, and especially moms, have a hard time setting their own prices.’

That single line is the core of the business model. On a generic freelance marketplace, pricing is the seller’s own responsibility. And low self-assessment translates directly into low rates, and low rates translate into lower retention. Allobee took that step in-house, reducing supply-side churn, while giving demand-side clients the experience of not having to worry about wildly varying prices. With 300 freelancers and 200 clients generating over $500,000 in annual revenue, that’s roughly $2,500 per client per year on a simple average, a figure that adds up for a small-team platform.

The tide turned in summer 2022

The moment the trajectory shifted is clear. In summer 2022, the fundraising outlook turned ‘dark.’ Markevicius cites two factors: a competitive market, and, plainly, that ‘women founders raise a disproportionately tiny amount to begin with.’ For a business with over $500,000 in revenue and $500,000 raised that had been operating on the premise of a next round, the plan stopped being viable at this point.

The action she took next became the turning point. In October 2022, she sent a mass email to several people in her network. ‘I emailed a handful of people in my network. One of the few who responded was Amy at The Riveter.’ The Riveter runs a community for women entrepreneurs and working women, and Amy was someone Markevicius already knew through the organization. The conversation started in October and closed by year-end, a span of roughly 2–3 months. The deal was an acqui-hire, and Markevicius took on the role of Chief Product Officer under co-CEOs Amy Sterner Nelson and Heather Carter.

Why it wrapped up in 2–3 months

The first factor is that materials prepared for fundraising carried straight over. Markevicius herself states that the due diligence prep for fundraising significantly sped up the acquisition process. The work of assembling numbers, contracts, and organizational structure for investors, and the work of assembling the same for a buyer, largely overlap. The work she’d been doing in early 2022 thinking ‘this is for fundraising’ became, the moment direction changed, inventory ready for ‘this is for a sale.’ That’s a very different starting point from scrambling to build materials only after the window has already closed.

Speed also came from where she looked: rather than ‘searching’ for a buyer, she ‘threw it to someone she already knew.’ A process of cultivating new buyer candidates comes with the full weight of the time it takes for the other party to understand your business, added on top. The people Markevicius emailed already knew her business and her character. The response rate wasn’t high, her own words are ‘one of the few who responded’, but with those who did respond, the substantive conversation could start from move one. She made up for a low hit rate with speed per lead.

Finally, there was a good overlap between the buyer and the assets on hand. The Riveter’s customers were working women, and what Allobee had was a 30,000-person email list and 300 vetted women freelancers. For the buyer, connecting that to its own community turned it directly into supply-side inventory. On top of that, the founder herself was joining as product lead. Acqui-hire pricing is determined less by ‘how much the business earns’ and more by ‘what hole this person and this list fill for us,’ and that overlap is what drove the negotiation’s short timeline.

How to read this outcome

Read purely as a success story, several things get missed. Terms are undisclosed, and it’s unclear from the article how investors were compensated against the $500,000 raised. Over $500,000 in annual revenue is certainly evidence the platform was functioning, but whether it could have kept growing independently without further capital is a separate question. The trigger for the sale wasn’t growth. It was hitting a dead end on funding.

Markevicius’s own reflection is candid: ‘I wish I had thought about [selling] as an option sooner.’ That’s the most practically useful lesson here. She only started considering an exit after the funding stopped. Considering a sale and actually selling are different things, and the former costs almost nothing to start at any time. Yet many founders don’t think about it until they’ve been reduced to a single option.

The case also points to another reality: she attributes part of the funding difficulty to the disproportionately small share women founders receive. In an environment where the same numbers can face a different fundraising probability depending on attributes, a one-legged plan of ‘grow via fundraising’ is itself a risk.

What’s replicable, what isn’t

Three things transfer. Keep due-diligence-grade materials updated at all times, regardless of whether a raise is planned. Look for buyer candidates within existing relationships rather than cold outreach. And put the option of selling on the table before you actually need it. Her own advice lines up with this: ‘Keep building your network, keep building relationships. You never know when you’ll need another option.’

On the other hand, some conditions can’t be carried over. Being an early employee at a high-profile startup like Postmates, and the US startup-world network that came with it; and the buyer’s customer base overlapping so cleanly with her own assets, a coincidence, above all, that can’t be engineered. The 30,000-person email list mattered to The Riveter because it was not a generic acquisition list but one with the attribute of ‘working women, freelancers’ built in. The same 30,000 people with a scattered attribute profile would likely not have made this negotiation happen.

Her network did work, but not because ‘she knew a lot of people.’ It worked because ‘she knew people for whom a use for her asset would immediately come to mind.’

Related reading

• MENTA — a domestic case of a skills-matching platform passed on to a major player in the same field
• Plausible — a contrasting path that reached $1M ARR without taking outside funding