In this SaaStr Europa 2022 presentation, Peter Specht outlines a practical, step‑by‑step fundraising playbook for founders. He breaks the fundraising journey into three phases – planning, preparation, and active execution – and stresses that founders can shape outcomes through disciplined tactics. Key recommendations include: setting a realistic raise size based on 20‑24 months of runway; timing the raise no later than six months before cash‑out and aligning it with strong growth momentum rather than absolute ARR; accounting for seasonal investor availability; building a target list of 20‑30 funds and conducting brief (≈30 min) warm‑up conversations to stay top‑of‑mind; narrowing to 4‑5 high‑probability investors for deeper engagement shortly before the round; allocating 2‑3 weeks to iterate a compelling deck and a stage‑appropriate data room (light for pre‑seed/seed, Notion/Google Drive for Series A, more detailed for Series B); running dry‑run pitches and pre‑answering common VC questions; and managing the entire funnel with an investor CRM to keep the pipeline active and parallel. Throughout, Specht emphasizes the importance of momentum, clear storytelling, and efficient process management to increase the odds of a successful raise.
Chapters
Welcome Creandum partner Peter Specht. Hi all, good to see you. Let's talk about a topic today that many of you, you know, will spend time on most likely, and it's— it comes over and over again, typically every 12 to 18 months or 12 to 24 months. Let's talk about fundraising. At fundraising, it actually makes a difference of how you play the tactics. It's not just, you know, I talk to an investor, he decides yes or no, and, and then it works out or not. But you can actually, besides sort of like the product you have, the business you're building, you as a team influence it quite a bit with process tactics. And And this is because, you know, VCs look at a lot of companies, and they react to sort of certain patterns they see, or they react to process momentum and these kind of things. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can influence it and how you can nail your process for your next funding round. And I will leave time for questions in the end, so if you have some, you know, feel free to keep it until then, and let's talk about it. So first of all, I usually see the fundraising process in 3 phases. You know, one is the fundraise planning, the other is the proper concrete preparation, and then there's the active process of it. And the bad news is you actually need to spend quite some time on all of these 3 things. And so Usually when we go into preparation mode, what does this mean? Months ahead of the fundraise, you know, 3, 4 months before, you should really think about what is your objective with it. Think about the rough, a rough round size that you want to have in mind. So basically setting the rough scene of what you want to achieve with it and what you need to raise actually, and how to come up with a number that that you need to raise. It's typically what do you need for 20 to 24 months of run rate? Ideally 24, of course, but that is the number you should probably be raising and have in your mind. And then the big question is always, when should we do it? Um, and there's of course at the very early stage, at pre-seed, is whenever you need to start to build and need money to hire people. But later on, I would say it's latest, latest 6 months before cashout, or whenever you have fantastic momentum or reached your revenue milestones or other, you know, commercial or strategic milestones, then it's a great time. And typically I say prioritize revenue growth and momentum, or like other metrics momentum, and over the apps, over sort of like the absolute revenue level or milestone. So an example for that is I sometimes get the question, should I raise at $1.2 or $1.5 million ARR? And it depends when you're— I would say it depends when your year-over-year growth looks much better, or when your monthly growth much looks much better, or when your seasonality is more favorable, because investors tend to have the tendency to prioritize momentum and over absolute number of— absolute level of revenue. So if you have $1.2 million ARR with 3.5x year-over-year and great current momentum and seasonality, it's much more favorable than if you have $1.5 million ARR but are coming just, you know, after 2 slow months in summer with limited momentum in your month-over-month growth and only have, you know, 2.8x year-over-year growth. So So prioritize the momentum part of it. And then one thing which is very obvious, but still lots of times people don't— still don't have it on their mind is seasonality around Christmas and seasonality around the summer holidays. And yes, not all investors are in the whole summer on holiday, but over a period of time, most of the time between mid-July and mid-August, Many of them go to holiday for 2 weeks, some for 3, some for 10 days. But you don't want half of your lead funnel of investors to, you know, write you an out-of-office email reply. And so you just want to keep that in mind. And there's 2 things to, you know, keep in mind of, like, who do you want to raise from? If it's angels, if it's VCs, if it's strategics, depending on that, you need to adapt your preparation and planning. And make a specific list of funds for it and your preference for it. And I get to that in a, in a second. Another thing I usually like is sitting down a few months before and looking at what were potential roadblocks in the last round. So what were, for example, rejection reasons that VCs in the last round had, and how, how have we developed on these reasons since then? And I usually advise to make a list, go through these rejection reasons from last round and see how you can address them in your talking line, but maybe also in the next 3-4 months until your fundraise to optimize those key KPIs or whatever reasons were to have a better answer to them in, in the next round. So then we get to the active part of preparation for it. And preparation— many people say, like, let's have coffee. I mean, hey, how are you doing? Let's catch up, let's have a coffee, a Zoom coffee, whatever it is. That's a good first step, but it's, uh, it's not enough. And, um, you can do much better than that. And I think with really spending the time on, on the material and stuff to prepare You're gonna have the key to success also. So what do you need to do in the 1 to 4 months before a fundraise? I usually advise to ramp up sort of your activity with investors and do those intro chats. And here comes the fine line. Intro chats can be— you can do endless amount of intro chats. You get inbound from investors, or you can outbound to investors and say, you know, let's get to know each other. But it's a fine line of how much time to spend with investors. And my personal take on it is it usually is not worth your time to spend 5 coffee meetings and 5 intro chats, or like warm-up chats, with the same investor, because it's great to build a relationship, but if you cannot do this with 20 people, with 20 funds, or 25 funds at the same time, of having like 4 or 5 warm-up meetings meet before. And so my advice usually is, if you have a list of 20 to 30 funds, for example, that you target, you should try to have at least half of them warm before. And that can be at an event as today at Saastr, or it can be a Zoom coffee chat, or a coffee chat in real life that you, that you're having. I would only make them 30 minutes. I mean, the purpose of this is just to know your business is great, you're a very interesting founder, and whenever you go fundraise, the investor's gonna spend high attention to this and focus and make time for looking at your round and dedicating resources to it, and you wanna be top of mind. That's what it's for. But likely, if you deploy lots of, lots of coffee chats, I think the ratio of your time allocated versus spending it on the business side the 4 months before to how it's changing your likelihood of fundraising is not so good. So I advise to have, for those 20 to 30 funds that are on your list, a 30-minute coffee chat. Focus on the storyline. Don't share your numbers in very detail yet, because if you share too much details up front, investors can hold you a little bit accountable for, like, say, hey, I'm at 50K ARR. When I go fundraising, In 3 months, I will be at 80. And then in 3 months, you go fundraising, and you're maybe at 65 or 70. And, you know, the investor of course then knows, okay, something didn't go according to plan. And if you just are a little bit more— less concrete in numbers, it gives you more— so more flexibility to craft your storyline when you actually go fundraising and control it better than if you share lots of stuff on the number side up front. But you should share, you know, your story, your vision, what you're building. And become top of mind. Um, when you sort of like got that warm list of intro chats, investors you had in the 3-4 months before, in the 4 weeks before, I typically recommend to have a warm-up sketch catch-up call with a few, with like a handful of investors only, which you think have a high likelihood of conversion and a very high interest and are sort of in your preference. It doesn't need to be your top 1, 2, 3 preference. It can be a mix of like preference and likelihood of converting. And those, you know, 4 or 5 funds you should be, you know, closer with and even more on the radar with, because you cannot do it with 25, but you can do it with a handful of funds. And then in the 2 to 4 weeks before, you should build a deck and a data room. And a common thing here is really, yes, we're going out fundraising, let's build the deck, we're gonna do it in the week before we go fundraising. Maybe not so great because it typically takes time to iterate on it. So if you better start 3, 4 weeks before, you craft a storyline, you can send it to entrepreneur friends, angels, your current investors, get the first round of feedback that probably takes 3, 4 days, and Then you iterate on it the next iteration and start adapting the storyline, adapting the deck. So it typically takes 2 to 3 weeks in building a really good deck and storyline with multiple iteration processes. So make sure you have that time allocated to it and also build a data room. And then roughly a week before, reach out to your warm and cold leads to schedule meetings. And ideally you do it on Monday and ask for a meeting next week. And some funds will come back and say like, hey, I really love what you're building, let's talk tomorrow. No, say great, we talk next week. Because what you want to do is you want to run the process in parallel because you're still in the preparation phase. If you now start to take meetings because you think, oh, they're so excited, and maybe just go goes quicker. I get that feeling, but it's much smarter for you to start sort of like a process in parallel when you actually focus your time on those chats, on the conversations, when you're into it, having you like multiple calls. And it's smarter than getting dragged into the process when you're not ready yet in the— So some learnings from that phase. I already talked about iterating on the deck. I highly advise to do dry runs, so having mock pitches with entrepreneur friends, angels, other investors, existing investors, because you will get better the more you pitch. And many of you probably know this, but the first pitch you do is probably not the best one, but the 5th or 6th or 7th one you do, you hear the same questions over and over again. VCs are, you know, often have very standard questions that are the same things around your business. And so you just get much better answering them in 5 calls, and in the 7th call, you're just much more convincing, have the better answer and storyline around it. Also, regarding these questions, I, I think it's great to have a list of anticipated questions for your fundraise and answer them yourself before. So ask your existing investors of like, what are your biggest questions around this? What would you ask me in the pitch? And then build a list in a Word doc and just answer them for yourself and practice them and build a storyline. I think that's— that can give you the confidence to give really, really good answers and, yeah, have good answers for the investors. We talked about the interchats before, and then build relationships with enough investors. So not only with 5 investors, but have a list. I usually recommend— I usually think that you can have 4 to 5 investor chats per day, and if a week has 5 days, that's somewhat around 20 plus, 20 to 25 investors that you can talk to in parallel. And I think that's a pretty good number to have. And when someone drops out, you just loop in the next one to keep the funnel alive. Data room or not? If you are— I think it really depends on stage if you should have a data room or not. Most companies right now do data rooms in Notion, I would say. It's much cooler than those very old-school private equity data rooms. No, you don't want to have that. You want to have a very easy and light data room. It can be in Notion or on Google Drive. And I think at pre-seed or seed stage, there's likely no need for a data room. Your company is very early. You will suffice with a, with a deck or maybe a financial model that you need. But for Series A, it kind of makes sense, and it allows you to run the process with more investors in parallel because you have less questions to answer. Because typically if you don't have a data room, investors will simply, you know, follow up with questions. Can you send me the X? Can you send me Y? I have a question about this. And if you have it centralized in one, in one place, it, it allows you to drive the process forward much faster and much more in parallel. And I've listed a few things here. I think it's key to have, of course, a deck, maybe a product demo via Loom, financial plan, key KPIs, and a slide around the backgrounds of the team, show, share your cap table. And for Series B, you're gonna make it more detailed and bigger and add a few more things around, maybe some background on product and tech, maybe some customer interviews, some more details about the market. But, um, I think about it: no data room in pre-seed or seed, some data room in Series A, and a detailed data room in Series B. Then run an investor CRM. I mean, I talked about the list of 20 to 30 funds, so 20 to 25 funds that you will talk about. You will probably make a list of 50 or 60 VC funds that are potentially a target for you. And I would, you know, together with your current investors or angels, go through them and
