Step 1 - Message Warm Leads

Reach out to your investor hit list and send your investor deck. With an email like this

<aside> 💻 Hey XX, it was great to catch up. We felt you would be an ideal investor for our business given your background and your firm’s values. We are raising our XX round and would love to have you on board. Some really excited stuff has been happening with [insert highlight]. I have attached a copy of our up-to-date deck. How’s your week looking for a quick catch up?

</aside>

Step 2 - Start the Sales Funnel (1-6 Months)

Your conversion rate for turning conversations with VCs into term sheets is going to be really low. Expect most to say no, getting a yes can often be a function of talking to 10-50 investors. You need to treat the raise process as a sales process, you have leads at different stages of the funnel, focus your time on the most promising ones.

Expect this funnel for each VC Firm:

1*. Send investors a PDF of your pitch deck*

2. Meet with a junior analyst or associate for a 30-minute Zoom meeting

3. Meet with a principal or partner in person or for a longer Zoom meeting

4. Answer a lot of questions over email + send more information

5. More meetings and more emails

6. Final Partner meeting

Here are some tips from the team to make the process easier:

• Automate as much as possible: The best founders use Calendly to schedule meetings and Loom to record them doing their pitch deck. It is probably the biggest hack to record your 30 minute pitch and then send it out to investors alongside your pitch deck. This speeds up the process significantly.
• Don’t spend time with investors who don’t seem that interested, double down on the ones that do
• Don’t get disheartened. Investors are wrong more than they are right — it’s often like a teacher who has never taught history marking a history essay based only off a marking rubric

Step 3 - Get to Final Partner Meetings

You should be steering each conversation to what is required for a partner meeting. This can be called a final partner meeting or an investment committee. It is the end of the process where the venture firm has to make a final decision about the outcome of your company.