A founder explains how to raise money during COVID-19 by treating fundraising as a learnable game, not luck. Build hundreds of leads, expect rejection, and nurture relationships over months. His team secured four angel commitments by staying persistent with investors they'd already been talking to.
just about fundraising during COVID I believe you've had a couple of angels who committed since the onset of the pandemic, and what's your advice in general about fundraising right now? How can founders do— they go about that?
Yeah, so fundraising is a process. It's a game, and it's a game that you can learn at places like Founder Institute. When we went through the Funding Lab, what I learned is that You do not need a big break. You do not need to get lucky. You do not need something for nothing to make it big in this world. All you need is to be persistent and have some guidance in taking the right steps. I used to think that because someone who may have founded a tech company that rhymes with schmoogle once ran my zipline at Burning Man, that like that was my big break, you know, and because of that we would get funded. No, no, I still want that person to invest in us, but like we're happy to go earn the right to have that honor, right? So fundraising is a process and you turn it into a game. You don't look for a big break. You just develop hundreds of leads and get ready to hear no 99 times in a row to get to that one yes. So we've actually had 4 angel investors commit to put money in since COVID-19 happened, and every single one of those investors is someone that we've been talking to for months or even as much as a year prior. So what you're doing is you're building a story of your company in your mind and you're slowly infecting that person with that concept.
