5 Counter-Intuitive Tips on Fundraising

After raising over $4M for my own business and helping dozens of other founders to raise funds from VCs and Angels I decided to share a few tips that I have found particularly useful:

1) Don’t pitch - it may sound counter-intuitive, but I recommend against using a pitch deck on VC calls. Instead, send your deck in advance and ask investors to show up with questions. If you do a presentation your chances of loosing them go up exponentially, but if the conversation is based around their questions, they’ll be forced to stay tuned in.

2) Go cold - the biggest myth in fundraising is that you need an existing network to do it. This is bullocks - a well crafted cold email and some hours invested in research can really get you places. You can expect a solid 15%+ reply rate for a good cold email from VC partners. 

3) Build FOMO - there are multiple ways to build FOMO among your investors and the easiest one is to plan your investor outreach in a way that they all start hearing about you at the same time. The way to do it is to make your outreach super concentrated and reach out to hundreds of people at the same time to max out of the amount of calls you are having in a given week. VC is a tight-knit community and your startup's name will naturally start popping up in convos they have between each other. 

4) Embody confidence - ask yourself “how would I act if I already had a Term Sheet?” before answering an investor email or taking a call. Fundraising is a confidence game and you win it by sounding like you already have it all sorted. 

5) Do not stop at your first Term Sheet - getting one is just the begging of the ride; this is when you need to 3x your speed and leverage FOMO to drive other investors to commit and get competing terms. Getting your fist TS takes weeks, 2nd and 3rd usually land in your mailbox in hours. 

Hope this helps! I am also planning to do a post about the current state of the VC ecosystem and the fundraising environment, so stay tuned.