Laurel Mintz's Actionable Guide to Startup Fundraising

Fundraising is really frickin' hard, first of all, and second of all, it means that you own less of your company long term. So it may not be the magic silver bullet that you all think it is. Hope you are doing well wherever you're calling in from. I am calling in from lovely Los Angeles, California. It's 10 AM here, so I'm just drinking my morning coffee and getting ready to talk to all you beautiful people. We're gonna have a really exciting conversation today about kind of a crossover between fundraising and marketing. I'm gonna share with you a bit about my story, and then we'll talk about best practices. I wanna make sure that this is the most effective conversation for you, so I'm gonna try and get through my slides as quickly as possible. And I really want this to be a dialogue. I wanna give you real-time feedback on any challenges that you might be having. So to that effect, what are the biggest marketing or fundraising challenges that you're having? If you could add those in the chat, I'll start to integrate those into the conversation as we go through the talk today. So Please go ahead and add your questions, issues, challenges in the chat. Thanks. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and share this PDF and then we're gonna get into it. Like I said, I am of the mindset that it's always better to be talking with you than at you. So I don't love speaking to decks typically. I really much prefer having a conversation. So let me know Make sure to ask questions. Perfect, thank you, Ava and Troy. I love this. Yeah, add as much as you can there. Alright, I'll tell you a bit about my story. We'll get through the slides, and then we'll open it up to a conversation. Really, this is about how to optimize your fundraising efforts through strategic marketing techniques. I don't know if you're going to receive the recording, but I think the Founder Institute is going to let you know that in the chat shortly. Where to start. Thanks, Rachel. So I will start with my story, which is— I'm going to start here, actually, which is that I have been a founder for 15 years plus, plus. Oh my gosh, it's been a long time. Actually, I'm going to share my slides so I can just chat with you guys while I'm telling you my personal story. So I started out as a corporate M&A attorney. I was that kid at 5 years old who everyone was like, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And everyone's saying a doctor, astronaut, a ballet dancer, whatever. And I was like, I'm gonna be a lawyer. And everyone was really like, oh God, look out for this kid. So I did go to law school. I hated it. I went to the dean and I said, I think I'm done here. I really just don't enjoy this process. These people, if I have to spend 80 hours a week doing this work, I think I might end up very unhappy. And she was smart enough to put me in the MBA program, with a focus on digital marketing. And this was 2006, so I'm probably dating myself here. But really what the MBA program was, was team building and problem solving and creative, creativity and all of the things that the law program wasn't. I did get barred in California. I am still barred in California. And I practiced for just a hot second at a big law firm up in San Francisco. And then my dad got sick. He's healthy now, so it's a happy ending. But I had to step down from my law firm at 26 to step in to run his company, which how many of you by raise of hands or emoji are familiar with the Bassett Furniture brand? It's a huge national chain out of North Carolina. Anyone familiar with Bassett? Got a couple, got one thumb up. I know you all are international, so maybe it's not a global brand, but it is certainly a big brand here in the US. So at 26, I stepped in and was interim CEO of that company. I had a staff of 60. I was the youngest person in the entire company. I'm definitely the youngest woman of, I think, 3 out of the 60 staff. So it was definitely a big challenge, really, really hard. But luckily my dad stepped in and was healthy 3 years later, and I decided to go back after those big law firm jobs. And every time I got an offer, I was like physically and viscerally nauseous and realized that running the business had turned me into an entrepreneur. So I started schmoozing and boozing, as I call it, with other entrepreneurs, and all of their pain points were around digital marketing, which happened to be where my MBA was. So I started consulting before I really knew what that was. And before I knew it, a year had gone by and I woke up one day and I was like, got it. This is actually a career path. And like most of you on this call, you wanna play a bigger game. And that's when I started hiring and training and doing all of my own brand and marketing work. And I'm really proud to say we are now 15 years old on the agency side. The agency is called Elevate My Brand, elevatemybrand.com if you wanna check us out. And that is a full digital and experiential marketing agency. So when you think digital, web content, social advertising, creative, that entire digital landscape. And when you think experiential, that's trade shows, national field marketing, all of the ways that you kind of touch and feel your audience in real time. And so we did that for a long time. We've been doing it for a very long time, worked with over 300 brands, over 200 of them have been diverse-led and 40% raised capital. So that is to say, we kept seeing this startup raise exit model. And then because of my legal background, a lot of the private equity and venture firms just happened to be coming to us to market them. And about a year and a half ago, one of the GPs, the general partners of that fund, one of those funds, asked me to stay on a call and said, Laurel, I have never seen someone with better earlier deal flow, who's more committed to diversity, and who most importantly can control the narrative of success with the marketing side of your business. And honestly, y'all, I was like, very flattered, no thank you. I'm running a great business. I don't need a second child. I'm good. And then for a lot of you on the call, you know the fundraising, landscape for diverse founders is very challenging. I saw the metrics around it, which is that less than 2% of venture funding goes to people who are queer, BIPOC, or female. And yet the business case showed us that when people like us did get funding, we returned on average at a 25% higher return rate. I mean, if you don't know those numbers, they like knocked me off my, out of my socks. I was like, it was just absolutely wild to me to see those numbers. 'Cause I'd been an LP, which is a limited partner in a venture fund for about 10 years, never really thinking about the diversity piece of it 'cause I'd never fundraised. And that's really the first piece I wanna stop on is that not every business is set up for a fundraise, right? So marketing is its own animal. We'll get into some of the details there. But the first takeaway I want you all to have today is that your business may or may not be set up for fundraising. I would say early days on the agency side, I thought I'm gonna make this a, you know, $25, $50 million agency. And the way I'm gonna do that is by acquiring other agencies. And the way I'm gonna do that is by fundraising. So I put this beautiful deck together about Elevate My Brand. I went out and I talked to bankers and private equity and venture firms. And all of them told me that You know, service-based businesses are really challenging to fundraise. And does anyone know why that is? Anyone put in the chat, why are service-based businesses harder to fundraise for? Anyone have an answer for that? Join me, this is gonna be interactive. Scale, exactly, you guys get it, yes. You can't touch and see them, harder to scale, and that scale is based on need, because it's a service. So what venture funds are really looking for are scalable businesses. Businesses, right? And the hardest part about scaling any business is the people. So if you have a people-driven business like an agency, which is a service model, you're gonna be inevitably more challenging to scale. And I would say the other piece of that that's important to note is that the multiple that you would see upon an exit, which is what a venture fund is looking for when they write a check, is going to be like a 2, 3, maybe a 4x, maybe a 5x if you're super, super lucky and really big. So not only is it more challenging to fundraise for service-based businesses, but it's really challenging to exit at a multiple that makes sense for venture. So with that, I would say if any of you are listening in and discouraged 'cause you are running service-based businesses, there are many other ways to fundraise for your business. You can bootstrap, obviously. You can go to your banking partners and get a line of credit. And there's all kinds of grants and things available to different types of founders. So I would say go that path first. The other really important path for service-based businesses are fundraising is that you then own all of your equity, right? I think people get really myopically focused and excited about the idea of fundraising, but fundraising is really frickin' hard, first of all. And second of all, it means that you own less of your company long term. So it may not be the magic silver bullet that you all think it is. So I want you to think deeply. Your first homework assignment is to think deeply about whether you are really truly set up to scale and whether scaling through fundraising, through venture is the right approach for your business. All right, I'm gonna take us back again. So I have this thought process and was doing all the homework and research around running a venture fund. I've been an LP for multiple years myself and my husband, and they've done really, really well for us. And so I called Jesse Draper. Do you guys know who Jesse Draper is? The Draper family? They're pretty, They're pretty prolific in the venture world. And we've been investors in her second fund for the last, I don't know, 4 or 5 years. And I called Jessie and I said, Jessie, I think I'm gonna raise a venture fund. What do you think? And her actual response was, sorry guys, I'm gonna curse on here. I hope that's okay. Her actual response was, fuck yeah, I'm in. Here's the check, go raise a fund and I'm gonna sit on your board. And that's how Fabric was launched. I had no intention of launching a venture fund. I was running this marketing agency. About 80% of my time now is focused on the fund and 20% is focused on the marketing agency. We just executed an ESOP. Does anyone know what an ESOP is? What is an ESOP? Anybody? An ESOP? All right. Stock options. Yes. Employee stock option plan. Yes. So we executed an ESOP with our agency team. So now my top 2 or 3 people on that side now own part of the agency, which is in furtherance of our greater social and financial good mission. So that's how And that's how we came to launch Fabric. But Fabric is by necessity kind of interwoven with the marketing agency. So now I'm gonna share my slides and get into a bit about that. And then we'll talk about the marketing focus piece as well. Where is my deck? There it is. All right. So we raise, I'll share with you. So, go forward. So Fabric is a $10 million USD fund that invests only with a diverse lens, which means We only invest in queer, BIPOC, or female-led consumer tech and future of categories. We're basically using my marketing expertise as an extra layer of diligence to make sure that we can pick the bigger and better winners because we're supporting with cash and sweat on the marketing side. I had this kind of moment of clarity in the, in the shower, because that's where you have all your best ideas, where I thought, if I'm going to run a venture fund, I need to make sure that I can provide outsized returns for my investors. How can I do that? I'm used to being as an operator, I know the marketing side. And I'll share with you at the end of this conversation a little bit about our process. But we have this discovery process that we're now calling the fabric thread count, which allows us to see a bunch of things very early with these companies. And these are things that you should be looking at as you're going out to fundraise. One, are your numbers real or are they full of you know what? Because a lot of your decks, let me just tell you, first of all, they're just not very good. And second of all, you're pulling from Tam and Sam numbers that actually don't make sense for your industry. The software that we use on the agency side allows us to see, are your numbers real? It also allows us to see how far you are from your direct and aspirational competitors in your space, which means if we're gonna write a check, we can see if our check's gonna meaningfully close that gap. And that's really how we have differentiated ourself on the fundraising and marketing side of the table. We've already gone through this, so that's a little bit about me. Ultimately, at Fabric, we have what's called a quadruple bottom line. We only invest in things that are good for purpose, people, planet, and profits. So our, our CUI, I hope I'm not butchering your name, I'm sure I am. It's an agency-specific software. So it wouldn't be something that you would have access to, but it's a listening software. There's a lot of different listening tools out there. It's something that we've been using for 12 years on the agency side. This is the first time any fund has ever used a software like this to use it as a pre-vet tool or vetting tool in the diligence process. So we've talked a little bit about this. And when I had that kind of moment of clarity, so to speak, I thought we're gonna create a new venture movement. We're gonna use marketing and the diversity conversation to create this new venture movement because historically systemic bias has led to the underestimation of minority entrepreneurs. And yet, like I said, diversity has a significant impact on the success of these brands. We hear it all the time on board seats, et cetera, as well. So diversity is something that's really critical to us as an agency and as a venture fund. And this is really like our big secret sauce, right? We are operators. Most venture funds are run by people who are in tech vests out of San Francisco, who come from traditional banking, traditional venture. I would say that being an operator gives us a very unique perspective because we are looking at so many different tools and approaches to running an actual business. We've been in the trenches, as they say. We only deploy within the diversity sector and we really lean into the marketing piece, as you can see here, and something I'm sure the reason most of you are here is understanding that marketing is such a huge critical success metric when you're launching and growing a business for exit or even for the fundraising process. The stat is here. Almost 80% of small businesses fail because your marketing sucks. Let's be honest. So these are the 3 things that we really focus on to ensure outsized returns for our investors. All right, I think I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna unshare this and answer some of the questions that have come in. Because I know there's been a lot of questions. All right, let me see if I can scroll back up. All right. Okay, so Ava says finding current information on investors for my industry seems to be a slight challenge. So this is a really important part of the conversation because The— so I've given you homework number 1, right? Homework number 2 is to make sure that if you are properly set up for fundraising and you are a business that can scale, that you're targeting the right types of investors. So maybe it's important for you to start out with friends and family or angel groups and really raise a bit of a smaller round first to kind of prove the model, get your legs under you, and start to show traction before you go out after more of an institutional round. But I understand that it's challenging to see, to find investors in your industry. You know, actually, I don't understand this 'cause there's so many different things. There's PitchBook, there's like, literally, if you Google, there's a million lists that come up of founders that invest in different categories. I'd have to know more about what your specific category was, but I would say that's tip number one is making sure that you are building out a really targeted venture list. For folks that only invest in your category. I cannot tell you how many times people have come to us and said, hey, I've got this great idea. I think that we should have a conversation because you would be a great venture firm for us. We're fundraising right now. And the first question I ask is, are you a diverse-run company? And they say no. And I said, well, then you didn't do your homework on me, right? Like, you're wasting my time and yours, frankly, because you haven't vetted built a list that's appropriate for you to target me. I'm not on— I should never be on your target list and you're wasting your time and effort. And I find that from a marketing perspective, from a time suck perspective, that ends up being a lot of the fail points for startup founders is you're just like, I just need to talk to all the venture funds. Everyone needs to talk to me. I have a great product. Everyone needs to talk to me, but not everyone is going to fund you. So be very focused. It's the number one I guess tip I would give is don't, don't spray and pray. Be really focused on your industry and those who would fundraise within your industry and know, are you, should you be fundraising for friends and family, angels, or actual institutional investors like venture? Troy asked, funding healthcare education is a unique area of focus. Health tech, med tech, all those areas are super hot right now. So you shouldn't have any problem building out those lists. We fundraise, or we invest in that category as well. The challenge is the channels, Elroy says. Alright, so let's talk about that for a hot second. Elroy, actually, would you mind unmuting? Let's just talk about what the channels are that you're having challenges with, if you could unmute. Is that allowed, or am I not allowed to bring people up on stage? I don't know how this platform works. I think Daniel, am I able to bring Elroy, unmute people, or do I just need to answer the questions?

Yeah, we can. Ideally, what we want to do is we wanna kind of let everyone—

Go through it and then do the questions later.

Yeah.

Okay. In the comment section. Great. No problem. Sorry, Elroy. So let's talk about the different channels that you're talking about channels for marketing, right? So let's talk about that. Let me reshare my slides and talk about the different channels. At the end of this, we do have an offer if you're interested in talking through things like developing the right channels for you. We can absolutely do that. It's one of our sweet spots at Elevate. Okay, so I'm gonna keep moving. I'm gonna go here. All right. So in terms of channels, I would say this is a really important kind of snapshot of the right channels that you should be marketing within. We have the online, which is all the things I mentioned before, web content, social advertising, and creative. And then you've got the offline, which are launch events, trade shows, conferences, traditional ads, more experiential moments, things like that. Usually we have a bubble at the top and the bottom, which is content and creative, and then metrics. Because one of the things that founders fail on is understanding the vast volume of creative that needs to be developed to service this entire universe. So another tip I will give you and something we can talk about if you wanna continue the conversation after, I'll give everyone my email address. It's just laurel@elevatemybrand.com if you wanna talk more things marketing. We take you through building out a really detailed marketing universe. So for example, as it relates to content, I love content. I'm gonna dig in here. Content can be many different things, right? It could be the content that exists on your website. It could be that you are trying to be a thought leader and developing volume of content to share on LinkedIn, on your social channels, etc. Content is one of the most powerful ways that you can communicate with your audience, fundraise effectively, and make sure that you're not being overly aggressive. So I'm going to double-click on this in two ways. One is the thought leadership piece. We know that in organic content land, in the land that Google owns, It takes a minimum of 2 pieces of content to organically impact your traffic every week. So 2 times 52 is 104 pieces of content. Usually when I say that to founders, they either want to punch me in the nose or throw up because it's a lot. I get it. But one of the things that you should think about doing is building what's called batched content. Now, that batched content is you go on the Elevate My Brand our social channels, our YouTube channel specifically. Same thing with fabric. I literally get in front of a camera. I have a lavalier mic and a ring light. You can see the ring light reflected in my glasses, all available on Amazon. And I build out and I create snippets of content, short form and longer form that my team then takes and pushes out across these different channels. So that would, could go in my newsletter, that will go on my social channels, that will go on my LinkedIn in a bit more edited format. But the reason that content in video format is so important, I mean, everyone says that they know that they should be doing video, right? But they don't really understand the reason behind it. So I'm going to give you a little of our secret sauce here today. Other than Google, what is the second largest search engine in the world? Anyone? And I'll come back up to the other questions again as well. Very good, Jeff, you get a gold star. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Isaac, you get a gold star. Most are too. But most people don't think about YouTube as a search engine, right? So if you're going to be creating content, you need to be thinking about building content for searchability. So a lot of people do video content and they're kind of like just speaking out into the void. It doesn't really have any impact. Google has a ton of free keyword tools so you can see what you're currently being found for and making sure that you are organically being found for the right words and what your competitors, competitors are being found for, right? So if you build out a, uh, This is homework assignment number 3. Build out a keyword list of the, the types of words that you wanna be found for. So for example, on the agency side, best marketing agency in Los Angeles, content marketing agencies, social media marketing agency, experiential marketing, event marketing. All of these things are things that we at Elevate should be being found for organically. And then when you do this batched content, which you can shoot pretty much a quarter's worth of content in a day if you're doing it the right way. I mean, I'm very, seasoned at this, obviously. But then you need to create content that speaks to those keywords. So, you don't just create content in a vacuum or for content's sake. You build it on YouTube or you build it on your phone or whatever with a production team depending on how high production value you need and how much money you have to spend. And then, you go back and you translate that into written content so that you're tapping into both of the largest search engines, Google and YouTube. This should all live on your website. So, you should have a blog or vlog page on your website, and that is how you drive organic traffic pre-ad spend. So, we'll talk about this a lot, I'm sure, when we open it up to more questions. There'll be a lot of questions around this, but you want to be thinking about your marketing in two ways: organic and paid, right? So, first, you need to build your organic, and that's what we're talking about now. Understanding what keywords you need to be found for and building content that speaks directly to those keywords will help you drive organic traffic to your website so that you're found and ranking higher on Google organically. So what you're gonna do, again, I'm gonna repeat this because not a lot of people do this for some reason, is you're gonna have a media player on your website and you're gonna have the content live there, and then you're gonna translate that into written content so that you're tapping into YouTube with the video and Google with the written content. And the great part about translating into the written content for Google is that if you miss some of the keywords, you can put some of them in there because it's really just a blog. Blog at that point. And then you're organically tapping into those search engines. Then, after you have about a month of that kind of content up and running, and that content should feed your social channels, your newsletter, etc., it should, you should see on the backend which of your pieces of content got the most traffic. And I would take that piece and maybe push that out on your email marketing campaign so that you can say like, look, we know people We're really interested in a conversation around content marketing. Here's the video on how to batch video content for your marketing efforts through content. Boom, that goes out on your, through your email marketing system. So, that is how you use content super effectively in an organic capacity. Now, the other thing that you can do, which is again a little bit more of the secret sauce, is then you boost it with ads, right? So, you boost it with Google Ads, You boost it on your social channels. And then I hope that you've heard of content aggregation platforms. These are like the, the Outbrains and Taboolas of the world. Is everyone familiar with these platforms? Maybe, maybe not. Basically what these platforms do is someone's already searching and they found an article that's about marketing in LA or marketing agencies in LA. And at the end of that article, there's a bunch of other Sponsored content. That is all paid for. It's all ads. But it's really, really effective because basically that person's already raised their hand and said, I'm interested in this topic. I'm already reading about this. So I'm going to then read this next article that's also covering this conversation. So that's how you would use content marketing and that channel specifically to support your marketing efforts. Oh, we've got actual Q&A section here. OK, so I'm going to— does that— was that helpful? I hope so. All right. Gosh, I've already been going for 30 minutes. How did this happen? It's going so fast. I'm probably gonna do another 10 on QA and then we'll open it up again. All right, so Ava says, for B2B SaaS startups seeking funding, I commonly hear that a lot of VCs love the pitch, but do not wanna invest in pre-revenue. Is it significantly harder to raise in a pre-seed with a solid team and prototype, but no sales yet? Alright, Eva, I'm assuming that you are a female founder. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But the truth is, is that it's so much harder for women to fundraise, period, full stop. I will say that this is more of an environmental conversation, the fundraising environment conversation right now. What I am seeing on the funding side is that we are actually not seeing a lot of pre-revenue, pre— what's called pre-seed companies. I think they are nervous about going into a fundraising environment that is still constrained. And what I mean by that is that people are still holding on to what's called dry powder. They aren't investing right now. They're still nervous. And that has a lot to do with the IPO markets not being like kind of opened up. We hope with the Reddit IPO that things will start to flow again and M&A activity will pick back up. All of that is a trickle-down to the investment and venture environment and will affect a company like yours in terms of raising in a pre- seed round. I am not scared of that category. And I think specifically for SaaS, I think there's a huge appetite for B2B SaaS still. Depends on obviously what your category focus is, but I wouldn't be scared about that. Again, it's about finding the right investors to, to take this on as a project. My, my kind of homework assignment to you would be to build out a board of advisors that kind of is in this world so that they can help spiderweb you out to the right VCs that would invest in that category. So I would say, I wouldn't say it's, it's a very challenging fundraising environment on both sides. I will tell you, I'm currently raising this fund. We've raised $4 million so far. We've deployed almost $2 million, and it is a shit show out there. So you're not alone, Ava. I know that doesn't make you feel any better, but the fact that you're focused on B2B SaaS actually is a much better category. People are still, investing a lot in that category because valuations, again, and multiples, like I said earlier, are still pretty high within that category. So, but the other side of that question is maybe you want to show some more traction first because then your valuation could be higher before you actually, you know, split some of your equity into the venture teams or whoever you're going to be raising from. So it's kind of like a, Sophie's Choice, right? Like, you, you really need the money to kind of leverage the team and build the product. But if you show a little bit of traction on the product, then your valuation would probably be a lot stronger, and you'd be a bit further down the road. So I think you just have to kind of keep going down both paths at the same time. Um, hope that was helpful. All right, uh, Elroy says, in the process of building the business, when exactly, or what stage, do you raise funds? Oh, Elroy, only you can answer this question. I can't answer this for you. You have to decide at which stage you need fundraising, right? There's lots of companies, lots of guys out there, and I do say guys, that fundraise on a concept and they get millions of dollars on an idea because they're part of that good old boys club that invests in, you know, other guys that went to Stanford and Harvard and all the, you know, Ivies. What I would again say, just like what I said to Ava, is getting yourself set up for a proper fundraise, making sure that you're not just giving away the farm because that's the other thing. Again, fundraising sounds so sexy. It really isn't. And you can actually get in a lot of trouble and you can be, you could end up giving away more equity than you ever should have in your company. So even if you got $1 million to start your company now or to launch it into the next, you know, round, but you gave away 50% of your equity, you're building this multi-billion-dollar company, you're not gonna own as much in the long term. So it's a real give and take again, Elroy, in terms of when you raise funds. Christian says, as an early-stage agritech startup, god, these bubbles, sorry, what makes you investor-ready? So agritech is a really interesting category. I don't particularly know that much about it. So I would recommend that you go out and you ask for informationals. So what that looks like is go to LinkedIn, figure out the investors that invest in agritech, and try and message them or use— there's a system called Email Hunter where you can literally find anyone's email. So that's a good tip too. And reach out and say, hey, Bob, I'm an agritech startup founder. Don't think I'm ready to fundraise yet, but I would really just love to, you know, take 10, 15 minutes of your time to understand how to be be investor ready and what you look for in an early stage agritech startup. So I would say that that's a really great tip is reaching out and asking for informationals before you're ready to start fundraising to build relationships. At the end of the day, this is 100% a relationship game, especially for early stage because most of you are pre-revenue or very small revenue generating. You're certainly most likely not profitable and won't be for some time. So when you think about it, they're kind of like, it's like a wing and a prayer, right? A wish and a prayer, whatever they say. They're looking at your deck, they're making sure that you're, they're doing their diligence across, you know, your team, your concepts, you know, what you have able to show them in your data room, things like that. But they're taking an early bet on you. That's why early stage investing is so exciting. But also why the fail rate is so high, right? Like, for sake of numbers, I don't know if you guys know this, but you have 10 companies, 8 will fail, 1 will be a 3 or 4x, and 1 will be your Google that will carry the entire fund. Typically, as an investor, that's what we're looking at. So most of you will fail. Sorry to tell you that. Maybe not if you work with us on the agency side, but you're never going to feel investor ready. It's a lot like having kids, although I don't have children. I've heard that it's a lot like having kids, right? You never feel ready. You just got to like jump in and fly cannonball leap into the process. It's the learnings along the path of fundraising that will help strengthen you and get you to a better place. For example, Christian, I would, I would ask if an investor would hear your pitch and get, just try and get as much feedback as possible so that you can iterate through and get to a really polished end goal for the brand. I hope that was helpful. Continuing to move along, Jonathan asks, it seems obvious, but how do you grow and scale without venture capital after a certain point, say Series A. So if you've already gone down the fundraising path and you've raised a Series A, you're probably gonna continue to need venture dollars to scale to those next levels, Series B, C, and beyond. My question back to you would be, what is the end goal? Is the end goal to sell to a strategic in some sort of M&A liquidity event, or are you looking to IPO? So if you're looking to IPO, you're either gonna grow by continuing to— if you're profitable, right, you're gonna reinvest that money into the company and grow that way, or you're gonna continue to raise your Series B, C, D, and beyond to get to that IPO. So again, these are kind of generic answers because I don't know the industry or the business that you're talking about, but if you've already done a Series A raise, you're either gonna grow organically and profitably and use that money and reinvest and maybe, you know, use lines of credit, etc. Or you're gonna continue going down the venture side of the fence. All right, moving, continuing down, we have so much to cover. Milan asks, how can we strategically leverage technology, storytelling, and donor engagement to optimize our fundraising efforts to ensure long-term sustainability for organization? So this is a nonprofit, I'm assuming, 'cause you're talking about donors. It's a completely different conversation, although it still should be run like a business. I'll share with you at the end of this session an offer if you want us to take you through this process and show you how to optimize each of the different segments and channels. That's really a very process. It can be very operationally driven. I would say most nonprofits just simply don't act like a business. They don't do social good. They don't do content well. They don't have any consistency across the board because they don't look at themselves like a business. So I I would say the fact that you're even asking this question is a really important starting point. Leveraging technology, doing things like, here's a great example that might be helpful for you, Milan. So on your website, my guess is that you have something that says, like, donate now or learn more about the organization, right? In my opinion, that is not an effective way to use technology or your website, which is your home base for fundraising efforts. What I would do, because if someone lands on that page and they don't know you and they're not ready to donate, they're not gonna get clicks enough deep and you're not gonna get their email address. Everybody on this call or on this webinar, you should be looking at your email marketing list like marketing gold. That should be the thing that you focus on growing the most if you are selling a service or a product, right? SaaS is a little different because you're selling B2B, or B2B SaaS, I should say, is a little bit different, but still, your email list is marketing gold. So for you, Milan, I would have some sort of a pop-up that answers the big questions that people always give you. So if if you are in the child welfare area, the 5 ways that you can support the evolution of child welfare or the history of child— whatever the questions are that you get. So it becomes a PDF that someone has to then give you their email in exchange for that great piece of content, that beautiful PDF that you've delivered, right? That is how you then would build your email newsletter. My guess is if you're looking at your website and you don't have some sort of pop-up, your conversion is pretty be, you know, pretty negligible. We need to make sure that you're looking at technology, storytelling, all the things you're talking about here to help, to help increase your database and then eventually remarket to those people for donor dollars. Is it okay to hit it on here? I don't understand what that means, so I'm going to keep moving. Netanel, I hope I pronounced that okay, how can I know how much money to ask for if there are no competitors for my product in my country? It's hard to know the exact number. Oh, whenever someone says there's no competitors, I call bullshit. And I say this from a marketing perspective because while everyone thinks that they've invented the next great new best whatever widget, service, product, whatever, when you talk about marketing, you're not actually looking for people that are looking for your exact product because you're building something that's completely new in a category. What you're looking for are kind of ancillary companies, businesses that are doing similar things that have captured the market share within your country. So for example, let's just say, because I'm looking at it, you built this amazing coffee mug. No one else has built a great coffee mug like this because it does something super unique. It actually translates every single thought in your head when you take a sip. Obviously, that's like a huge wow factor, right? Like, that's an incredible company to build, but you're not actually going to be looking for a competitor that does exactly you're gonna find it. What you're gonna look for are people that are searching for tech-enabled mugs, right? So what I would argue for you is you need to do a roadmap. You need to really look for the top 3 to 5 direct or aspirational competitors who have captured a majority of the market share within your general category, not your exact product focus. I hope that's helpful. We have a process to help you do that. And then it's a multiple of that, right? So if you're looking to, let's call it raise, you need $50,000, $100,000 a year as your burn rate is a very low number, you're gonna want a multiple of that so that you have probably 2 or 3 years of run rate before you need to fundraise again, depending on what your profitability numbers are gonna look like over what time. So it's hard for me to answer that again specifically without looking into your exact market goals, etc., where you're at in this process. But the first thing on the competitor side, like, don't be a special flower. You're not that special, sorry to tell you. You need to figure out who has the most market share. These can be companies that have fundraised similarly with what you're doing, and then work backwards from there. That's how I would work on that. How to, Elroy says, how to narrow down various channels. So I would say narrowing channels is a really important question. Thank you for asking that. You wanna get good at a few channels first. You don't wanna be everything to everyone, especially in startup land, because you simply don't have bandwidth. So I would say being really great at content marketing, because you're going to want— everyone asks, how can I get more bang for less buck? Organic content is the approach there, right? Then you want to make sure you're doing email marketing, social, some of the other pieces, maybe spending some ads on that. Again, we can talk to you about the approach that we have. I'm getting the hook for wrapping things up because there's so many more questions to answer here. I'm going to go back to my slides real quick. And wrap things up, and then I think we can open up for networking. Is that, does that sound good? And then we can, I can continue to answer some questions. Alright, so I've got here, this is how we do our diligence in terms of when we're looking at companies from a marketing perspective for fundraising. So we're looking at, and again, this was which was part of the question that we're asked, industry differentiation, your visual branding, your messaging and positioning, your platform health, your search optimization, your social media health, and your back and forth. These are just a few of the things that we look at. But this analysis is really critical to being set up properly as a business that's going to be set up for fundraise, because you've got your marketing up and running and tight. And marketing, again, you heard the stat, marketing is 80% of success of most of these brands. And if you're building out your deck right, you're going to show what use of funds is going to be used for. And again, 80% of use of funds is usually focused on marketing. So get it together and get it done right the first time. Here's a little tip. Again, they're going to send this video out so you can have this to look at post this call. Making sure that you're really clear on who your audience is for things like content are foundational pieces. Branding is a foundational piece. Messaging and positioning are foundational pieces. Audience targeting are foundational pieces. And you're gonna have different targets, right? You're gonna, if you're fundraising, you're gonna have your fundraising targets, but you're also gonna have your audience targets for your product or service. I'm being super clear and building out your audience personas for that, for those. Will help you dig into what are the right channels for you. Where are those audiences, right? If you're targeting a Gen Z, Gen Alpha audience, you're going to be on TikTok, right? You're not going to be on Facebook most likely. So creating these, using these foundational pieces, branding, messaging, and positioning, and targeting as your top 3 foundational marketing pieces are going to set you up for longer-term success as you go into a fundraise cycle. We talked about this a little bit as well. Again, you'll get this in post. And this is the last thing I'll say. We do this in a really effective way. We, oh, my content person had a little typo there. We'll fix that. But we can take you through a session at Elevate. We're giving you a discount rate here. It's usually, I think $950, I believe is the rate. So we can actually take you through how to build out your unique marketing universe. So that you can be set up for success. And again, my email is laurel@elevatemybrand.com. I have an incredible team and we can take you through all of this. My last ask here is to please scan and join us on all these channels. This is the fundraising side, not the marketing side, so that when you are ready to fundraise, you think of us if we are within your target for fundraising. And with that, I will pass it back to Danielle.

Hey, Laurel, thank you so much for that really, really, really engaging session. I love how you just kind of took the reins, answered a ton of questions. So super, super thankful for that. We do have a lot of questions coming in, and I also have some questions that I've written down here and we have about 10 minutes before we kind of wrap up. Is it okay if I kind of go through some questions super quick?

Let's do this.

Awesome. Okay, so let's say I am pitching to a VC. Let's say I'm pitching to Fabric VC, right? What are some of the metrics that really matter to you? What are some, you know, slides that I really need in my pitch deck?

Yeah. So I think it has to start with the problem that you're solving, right? Like, why is this important? Why is this gonna be valuable? And why do you have the better mousetrap, right? For me, it's about vibe as well. So I wanna like, I always invest in people that I like physically, like, or not physically, personally, right? There's a lot of qualitative and quantitative things that have to go in when you're pitching. So I would say in terms of the slides, Use of funds is super important. So if you got this amount of dollars, how would you use that? Why is this the number that you need, right? And does this set you up for long-term success? One of the biggest challenges that we see in decks is someone's only raising like this much when they really need to be raising this much. And so I, as the VC, know that they're gonna have to come back to me or someone else in 6 or 12 months because they haven't given themselves enough runway, which to me means that they don't have the right finance and accounting team behind them to ensure that if I write a check, it's going to be used effectively. So I would I would say the financial modeling piece is super critical. That is not my skill set. I'm the money— oh, I am the money person. I am the marketing person. I'm the relationship person. I'm the loudmouth, obviously. But I've got really great finance and accounting teams. And even if you're not great at that, you need to have someone on your team that is focused on that so that your financials are really, really strong. I would say the other thing is keep the deck really short. Keep it to the point. 7 to 10 slides, and then do exhibits, right? Have a data room where you can see all of the detailed pieces, because you have like 15, 20 minutes of my time. That's all you're gonna get. Don't give me a 35, 50-page slide deck. I'm not gonna read it, and you're gonna probably not move to the next round. So it's a use of funds. Your financials are really important in how you're building a better mousetrap.

Awesome. So just kind of a follow-up on that, So let's assume that someone has pitched to you, they were probably way too early for you, and they approach you again, right? What are some of, you know, those metrics or progresses or like milestones that you want to see before you're willing to kind of invest in or like consider a startup that you've already seen pitch to you before?

That's a great question. So we have a very operationally driven process. If anyone wants to sign up with us, if you go to fabricvc.com, com. There's a tab that you can sign up with pitch days every quarter. But what that does is it drops you into our data room or our deal room rather as well. And that's where I look to go back once we have called capital to deploy. I go back to that deal room and I pick the companies that I remember really liking and I have notes in there. So if I found, if I met a founder that was a little too early, but I thought had something of value and I wanted to circle back with them, I would have a note there. So I would say just keeping me abreast of anything that's new and exciting, like a quarterly update would be great. If you want to go a little more consistently, because you're like really aggressively fundraising, and we only have a window to deploy our capital, a monthly update is fine as well, just don't make it very long. And I would always say at the end of it, don't— funders are just— you should be not putting yourself like in a lower position than the fundraiser, the funder, sorry, Founders shouldn't be putting themselves underneath the funder. I was just at a conference for 3 days talking, and I'm like, well, we are looking for the companies that we need to deploy capital into, and that money has to make money for us. So we are just as much looking for you as you are looking for us, which means consistency and follow-up. And that's really what I want to see is progress, right? And then I'll say, okay, we'll send you over to our diligence team. I feel like you're ready. And we actually have done this. We just invested in a company that I have known for probably 4 or 5 years. I didn't think she had product market fit at the time. She was super consistent about following up with me and we just wrote her our first check, um, like 30 days ago. So it's about consistency and follow-up, not being too aggressive and showing milestones, uh, of increased progress.

Awesome. So yeah, just to kind of follow up on that relationship bit when it comes to VCs and startup founders. So as a startup founder, how do you determine if a VC is right for you? Because obviously like this relationship, it's way more than just like transactional, right? There's like this layer of mentorship there. There's, you know, there's this very direct communication, especially if you're somebody who's like, you know, you're sending out all your quarterly updates and everything, right? So how do you kind of determine if a VC is the right fit for you?

You have to make sure that they're investing in your category. You have to make sure that they invest the check sizes that you are looking for. And then it's also like a personal touch. Like for us, we only invest in companies where we feel like we can add value because we do part sweat, part cash in our deals. So we don't only do that. Obviously, we've written some checks that are just cash deals and no sweat attached to them. But to me, and I know people have said this, but like, do I want to have a cocktail with you? Do I feel like You're a good person. Like, at the end of the day, I think if you're looking for just a check, you're missing so much opportunity. So again, we're looking for you just like you're looking for us. It's like the dating game. You have to make sure that you have a couple of, you know, phone calls and coffees and cocktails and maybe a lunch or two. It's a long game and it's a long-term relationship, right? Venture money is long-term money. It's 10-year term on average, and they're saying even 12 with the pandemic kind of stalling out on the IPO market. It. So I would just make sure that you're not— first of all, don't just jump into bed. No shame. We're very, you know, sex positive over here, but make sure that you are building a long-term relationship with someone that you actually really like, that you feel can add value, and who would frankly take your phone calls if you were having an issue. It's like the dating game. That's how I feel about it.

Yeah. We're right about at the hour mark here. I just want to kind of maybe talk about about one of those marketing bits that you threw out. One of the things that you mentioned was building an emailing list, right? Super critical. It's almost always, not almost always, but you know, oftentimes it's a very qualified group of individuals that you can reach out to. So my question is, how do you build, how do you keep building that emailing list? Like what are some tactics that you could deploy, especially as an early stage founder, to kind of collect those emails?

So you're collecting emails on site on your website, right? That's the centralized location where all of your content and collateral and materials are and where you should be driving people. So first of all, I would say make sure that you're focused on driving them to one place. A lot of people are really focused on building social, which I also think is important, but you, unless you're driving them from social to your website, you're not gonna own those followers. So making sure that you own that list is really critical, which means you need to focus on on what's called top of funnel visibility and awareness, which is really traffic to your website. How can you increase traffic to your website? By getting on stages and talking and driving people to there and giving an offer. By spending money on Google Ads and driving eyeballs from all around the world, if that's who your targets are, to your website and having some landing page that converts them with a great piece of content. Again, the content conversation as a whole, that's the organic side, like building out those two pieces of content, pushing them on YouTube and translating on Google, and having that all be housed on your website in a media player, making sure everything stays on site and is really, really sticky. That's the best way. It's either organic or paid, or getting in front of lots of people on an audience like this, driving people to your website. Or you can buy lists. I mean, you can buy lists as well, but I would say those tend to be a little dirty. They're not really clean lists usually.

Yeah, and it's also like a question of how qualified are those lists, right? So it's always kind of best you do it yourself. And with that, Laurel, I think we are now done with our Q&A. Thank you so much for taking out the time to join us. Thank you so much for answering all those questions. Folks, if you loved everything that you heard here, please show her some love. The emojis are right at the bottom of your screen. There we go, Laurel. I hope you can see it. A ton of hearts, a ton of thumbs up. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for being here, folks. Before we head out, Laurel, if you have any parting words, any words of wisdom.

Hmm, parting words of wisdom. Marketing is the most important part of building relationships. When you're out fundraising, you're marketing. When you're building your database, you're marketing. Everything is marketing, and marketing is really sales, right? It's shortening the first, the point from first point of contact to close of business. That is why marketing is so critically important. And if you think that you're not in sales and you're not in marketing, then you're just kidding yourself. So get on board, figure it out. And if you're not good at it, work with a team that is, because you don't have to be great at everything. I mean, like my husband's an engineer, he's super talented at lots of things. Marketing is not one of them. And that's okay. There's other people out there like us that can help you, but go out there, Be fabulous and make change possible.

Awesome, awesome. There you have it, folks. Be fabulous and make change possible. I hope you all have a great rest of the week. And again, if you need to learn more about the Founder Institute, please head on over to f5.co. If you want to join an upcoming event, f5.co/events. Folks, with that, we are done for now. Please do stick around for the networking. We'll see you in the next one. I hope you all have a great day.