Let me tell you about what I learned since iWeb went public, in September 2004. First of all, to be involved on the stock market, your company needs to be a certain size, financially speaking, for this to work – this is usually your market cap (Market Cap: the value of your company ). In Canada, specifically on the TSX Venture, you must have a market cap of at least $10-20 Million, all the way up to $100M. Bigger than $100 Million, you can migrate to the senior markets, like the TSX, the NASDAQ, etc. iWeb was actually worth around $5M when we did an IPO – it was really early in our development, but we were growing so fast that it made sense. We peaked at around $47M of market cap in mid-2007, before the financial crisis, not bad, huh?
The other thing you must be careful with are all the fees involved with going public; there are lawyers, accountants, brokers, TSX fees, and more. What I learned, and thank goodness I did, is that you make a commitment to respect the fee and put all this in contact. The other very important thing is to be well surrounded.

iWeb was ranking in the top 50 Venture in 2008
Find a mentor who has been through this before, or who has experience in a publicly traded company, someone you can trust! iWeb used a capital Shell, a CPC, which is sort of like a reverse take-over. The small private company acquires the publicly traded entity. The people who were involved with the shell company stuck around and helped us for a while, mentoring us through some of the important first steps of being public – this really makes it easier for your company to succeed.
For iWeb, going public gave us the means to buy our first Data center and all the infrastructure. We raised $750 000, but the net was $500 000 (after paying all the fees I mentioned). back then, it was a lot of money – our annual revenue was $1.3M. With this money, we would quickly generate over $2.9M of revenue – we all knew that we were working on something very special…
Next post I will talk about the challenges associated with growing revenue!