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If you are looking for ideas on the transformation of your home or on the completion of a particular house project, Yaron Ben Shaul hopes you will visit the Hometalk website.
Over the past eight years, Hometalk has built a DIY community. Through its website, people offer advice on everything from gardening to crafts, to construction projects and cleaning toilets. It may soon offer even more for savvy owners, including allowing them to communicate directly with experts in particular areas.
"The goal is really to own that niche in the home improvement market," Ben Shaul told Business Insider. He continued, "We want to own the DIY portion."
Ben Shaul and his team have launched Hometalk as a bootstrap operation – that is, without any outside investor – and have led it until last year. Focusing on the development of its community and building its brand, the company has registered some 17 million registered users and 9 million individuals now view its site each month. Thanks to the revenue generated by the ads on its site, Hometalk works almost at equilibrium, said Ben Shaul.
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But he had greater ambitions for Hometalk and decided to seek external financing to develop his business. According to PitchBook, he collected $ 4.5 million last June and closed this month a $ 15 million round led by NFX.
Hometalk has collected the new money "to bring the product, the company and the community to a higher level and create a quality brand," said Ben Shaul. "It's hard to do when you're booted."
The company, which has offices in New York and Jerusalem and has about 60 employees, plans to use the new funds to experiment with different ways to grow its business. He hopes to sell video ads for specific home improvement products. And it is planned to test a market that would allow users to offer their expertise to other members of the community for a fee.
Assuming one or more of his experiments succeed, Hometalk plans to use some of his new funds to turn them into prototypes into fully operational features of his site, said Ben Shaul.
The funds are "for the purpose of discovering and starting the scaling up process," he said.
Here is the platform used by Hometalk to raise $ 15 million:
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