Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehive, closed a Series A in six days by sending detailed monthly updates to 350 people for six months. The updates included revenue, user growth, and what experiments worked or failed. When he started fundraising, 30 investors already knew the business and were ready to commit immediately.
Many CEOs struggle raising venture capital. It takes forever. And one of their biggest complaints is how long it— they spend building relationships with investors who just ultimately pass. Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of Beehive, did none of that. In this video, he talks about how he used his platform to give him maximum leverage, ultimately raising his Series A in 6 days. Unheard of. Let's hear from Tyler.
I noticed you started putting, or maybe it's an ongoing practice, but I just noticed it, putting investor updates out. And I'll say for what it's worth as a longtime angel that I correlate investment success by very highly with the frequency of CEO updates. So I love that. And just curious, To encourage more CEOs to do that, because not everyone does. What benefits have you gotten from, from that practice?
Yeah, you can probably tell from like the through line of a lot of these answers is like getting my thoughts onto paper, making it transparent from employees, colleagues, investors, and even like the public and users and like continuously doing that has been tremendously helpful. We do like the Sunday emails that I hit on. I write a monthly investor update where I share top line revenue growth, user growth, like every key metric is shared on a month-to-month basis along with like a full digest of what we tried, what worked, what didn't work, what we're building now, my hypothesis of how these different pieces will fit together to make us a better company in the future. And so I send that to probably 350 people every month. All of our employees get it. All of our investors get it. Investors who passed on us get it. And just like people that I'm like nurturing the relationship with get it. And so very tangibly what it has done is it sounds like a lot of work. It saves a ton of time. People don't have to reach out to me asking like, what are the latest updates? Like they get them every month in their inbox. So like I don't have to talk to like investors a bunch, which is great. And also because in nurturing relationships with investors, there were investors who wanted to invest that I just didn't take calls with, but rather than taking like a 30-minute coffee chat, I just added them to our investor update email list and they started getting investor updates. So when it came time for us to raise our Series A, we probably had like 30 investors who had been following for the past 6 months, every single monthly update. They feel comfortable with how the business is growing. They understand how I think about the business, how I communicate what we're prioritizing, and they've seen the growth., and that led us to raising our Series A in 6 days.
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