Nathan Beckord: How to Get an Introduction to Startup Investors

Hey everyone, my name is Ian Isaac. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for joining us today. It is Monday, 9 AM Pacific for some folks, and on the East Coast it's a little bit later. And then if you're coming in from different places, different regions, it's also later. But if you're on the West Coast, appreciate you folks jumping on bright and early. Start of the week, we're really, really excited to have this webinar for you on how to get an introduction with Startup Investors, run by Mr. Nate Beckford. He's awesome. He's gonna walk through some really good frameworks for you all to start using straight away. Akshay, in the back, can you start to bring up Nate? In the meantime, let me go over some housekeeping rules while we get things set up. We're going to be doing some con— Nathan will do his presentation. After that, we'll kind of jump into Q&A. There's a Q&A button on the right-hand side. Please click that, you know, submit your questions there. Towards the end, we'll kind of bring up the top, whatever, 5 or 10 questions, bring it on stage, and Nathan will discuss it and answer it. It's just a more efficient way of kind of doing Q&A. And then after the session is done, you'll see a bunch of smaller, smaller tables, you know, jump into it. You can network. I'll be on some of the tables. Nathan will be on a couple tables. So you can network with each other, talk about the content, talk about the topics at hand, right? In the meantime, let us know in the chat. I think folks have already started to write this, but like where are you coming in from? I see Tunisia, Finland, Hamburg, Colorado, LA, Michigan, Raleigh. Good stuff. Chicago, Philly, London, UK. Awesome, awesome. Toronto, represent. Awesome. DC, Bolivia. Wow, Bolivia, that's interesting. Dearborn Heights. I don't know where Dearborn Heights is, but sounds like a suburb. Bucharest, DC. Cool. Nathan, do you want to unmute yourself and show your video? So let's kind of get this started. I'll guess while you're doing that, let me— okay. Hey Nathan, you're with us. Nathan, I'm going to kick it over to you shortly to do an introduction and then we'll think, but let's run our poll right now. "Are you currently fundraising or planning to within the next 6 months?" I missed the bracket there, but let's see kind of where the audience is coming from. So Nathan, we do have an international audience there for you. We have 209 people live right now. I know we had close to 550 people register, so let's just, we're just waiting for a few more of the stragglers come in, but yeah, okay, so it seems like majority of the audience is planning to fundraise within the next 6 months, Nathan, so no pressure. You got to give them some solid content so they can walk away with some good frameworks. Awesome. I'll do my best.

Thank you.

I'm going to hide this from the stage. Nathan, without further ado, do you want to give a little bit of an intro to yourself and then whenever you're ready, you can kick off the presentation.

Absolutely. This is so fun for me. I love watching the the chat and where everyone's from. Everything from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Cairo, Egypt and basically everywhere in between. It's really cool. So welcome everyone. Thanks for coming out this morning. All right. So I'm going to do a fairly quick little talk here. Let me share screen. And I'll just do a quick little intro of who I am. I won't get too deep into that. So, just very briefly, my name is Nathan Beckert. I run a startup called Foundersuite. We've been around about 6 years. Before that, I had a business called Venture Archetypes. And then before that, I was doing investment banking, raising capital. So, basically, my entire career since college on to today, I've been out of college a while, has been raising capital for startups. And so, I think I know a lot about this. And my startup Foundersuite is a platform platform for raising capital. So hopefully I can share a couple things about this. So this talk we're going to do today is a snippet of a slightly longer talk and boot camp we're going to be putting on. And the target or the conversation today is going to be about how to get a conversation started with investors. This assumes you've built a list of investors, you've done some research, and now you're ready to break the ice with them and talk with them. So let's, let's get into that. So, all right. So again, this assumes you've identified perhaps, you know, anywhere from 100 to even 300 investors that are a good fit for your investor. And in the larger boot camp we do, We talk about how to build that list, but now we want to talk about how to break the ice and get connected and, and, uh, and having pitch meetings and other kinds of meetings with investors. 4 main ways of getting connected to investors. One, very obvious, this is, this isn't going to be rocket science, but it's using LinkedIn to find a warm intro. So let me jump over and show you what that means. Let's say, uh, I've identified Katarina Fake as— this is a real person, she's not fake— um, as someone I want to get to know. Maybe she invests in my type of startup. I've qualified her that she's actively investing, that she does— like, I think of Founder Suite is kind of fintech, SaaS, SMB, right? And so if I was raising a seed round and I noticed that she was doing some deals in in SaaS or fintech, and I want to get to know her. And I know she's an active angel investor. I've added her probably to my CRM or to my spreadsheet or my list of investors. Now I want to figure out how to reach her. You've heard this before if you've been around the startup world. The warm intro is still how probably 90% of deals get done. Not to plug this, but we have a podcast called How I Raised It. Where we've interviewed over 250 founders on how they raise capital. And, and my 90% statistic is pretty accurate. Like, most, um, intros to VCs come from warm intros. Okay, so how do we do that, right? Uh, one is just plugging each investor into LinkedIn and seeing if you have any mutual connections. If you do, there's a hierarchy of who to ask for that introduction to Katarina. So I would simply scroll down this list and see who I know. A lot of these people I'm connected to. Notice these are all first-degree connections, so that means I'm connected to them on LinkedIn. And Steven Horowitz, I'm connected to directly, and Steven is connected to Katarina. But I actually don't really know who Steven is. Some of these people I know only very loosely. You know, so I'm really kind of looking for someone. So this guy Ryan, I've— I know fairly well. He actually lives around the corner from me, and so I might, um, put him as my connector. Okay, so if you have the luxury of having more than one choice here, there's a bit of a hierarchy of who to ask first. Who knows you well? Some of these people I don't know very well. Ryan, I do know. If you have more than one person that you know pretty well The very best person to ask for an intro is someone that's made Katarina money in the past. That could be another investor or maybe a founder she invested in. Second on that list would be, you know, a personal friend, right? Just their friends in common. Third on that list is, you know, maybe someone that's connected that you don't know that well, but you don't really have too many other choices. Like, um, Don, I kind of know, not really. And then fourth on the list is, you know, someone that Katarina met at a conference years ago and they don't really know each other, but it's still better than a cold intro. So basically you do this for, let's say you built a list of 100 to 200 investors. You do this for every single one and figure out if you have any mutual connections and you find the best. You're optimizing for who knows you and who has a good connection to that investor. Okay, so that's number one. Now, a lot of people I get, you know, you're going to say, well, I don't have any connections to these investors. I'm in Cairo. And all these investors are in Silicon Valley or New York, wherever. Okay, fine, no problem. Method number 2 is what I call working the entrepreneurial network, working the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so there are a couple tools here you can use: Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and AngelList. Um, this screen is showing let's say Tim Draper. You probably can't tell from this search, but over here on the right, let's say Tim Draper is someone I'm trying to get in touch with. Here's the little hack. I plug Tim Draper into Crunchbase. I see what startups he's invested in in the last maybe 12 months. And if any of these are relevant to me, like in a similar kind of space, you know, this is hardware, that's pen test as a service. I don't even know exactly what that is, penetration testing or something. Um, you know, none of these really jump out as very relevant to me. But if I find one that is a SaaS business or a fintech business, what I want to do next— let's pretend that Duolingo is actually a SaaS business. I would go and find the founder of Duolingo. I would then try and find their email address. Let's say it's someone named Jennifer Smith. I would find her email address, and you can use RocketReach, you can use Hunter.io, you can use Apollo. There's lots of tools to look up people's email addresses, and I would reach out to the founder of Duolingo. You know, let's actually just do this, uh, for fun. Let me put in Duolingo. And hopefully I can find the CEO. Okay, let's find people. And ideally, this one might be a little bit trickier. But I'm really— this might be a pretty big company. So maybe it's not the best, but I'd probably try and find the CEO of Duolingo. Let's narrow it down by founder. And all right, well, let's just— this is a tricky one. I'm sorry, I should have tested this one beforehand, but let's say it's Basically, the hack here is to reach out directly to that founder in a very polite cold email saying, hey, I see that Tim Draper— remember, trying to find a connection to Tim Draper— I see that Tim Draper has invested in you. I've been following Tim for quite a long time. He's a really active investor in space. I'm really impressed with him. I'd love to hear what it's like working with him. I know he invested in your startup. Has he been helpful? Is he active or, you know, is he more passive in the way he helps out? And you get it. And, you know, can we hop on a call? Can we hop on a Zoom? Can I take you to coffee if they're local? Can I buy you lunch? And I'd love to just pick your brain about what it's like working with Tim. And you get a little dialogue going with that company founder. It's okay to ask for the intro. So Summarizing this, plugging each investor into either Crunchbase, LinkedIn, or AngelList. Uh, let me give you an example of another one here. Let's say I'm trying to get in touch with Zach Koelius. Well, the beautiful thing here with him is that I believe he actually lists many of his companies, right? So here's another angel investor I'm trying to get in touch with. I would probably recognize some of these. Most of these companies, I don't know anything about them, but if they were in my general space, SaaS fintech, I'd probably know them. So again, repeating that process, you know, I would look up who's the founder of Mercury. They're kind of fintech. And I would reach out to Ahmad and say, hey, Ahmad, I see Zach is invested in you. "Can we hop on a call? I'd love to pick your brain about him." And then you ask him for that intro to Zach. And the reason this little hack works really, really well is because Zach got to know that founder of the startup over a period of probably 6 to 12 months. They went through due diligence with that founder. There's a level of trust that Zach has with that CEO, that startup CEO. And that startup CEO was doing this hustle technique to get intros 6 months ago or 12 months ago when he or she was raising money. So there's a really good empathy there. Basically, long story short, you know, find portfolio company founders, reach out to them, get a dialogue going with them, buy them lunch, pick their brain, get them on Zoom, and then ask for the intro. Yes, it takes more time, but it's a very, very strong intro source. It'll make your deal go faster than other methods. Okay, so there's step— there's method number 2. Method number 3 is admittedly a little bit more fun, um, so it's using ChatGPT to write a cold email. So let's, let's do that. Let's say I want to, um, Well, let's just try a new one. Okay, so write an intro email to Marc Andreessen, hopefully I can spell it right, of A16Z asking for a meeting. Mention my background. This is what's fun about it is it can pull stuff from my background and reference some of his early startup successes. Alright, let's see what we got here. I'm a young entrepreneur. I'm not really a young entrepreneur, but still good enough. Interesting. This didn't quite get it right, but the fun is you can tweak this, make it more formal. Do another one here. I know I went to a dinner last week with Zach Coelho, so I was just showing you, and John Steinberg. I didn't really get to talk to him. But I know he's a big wine guy, and what's fun is I can have ChatGPT reference that. Let's see if this one does a little bit better. It's funny, it's kind of similar. Usually they're able to tweak it a little bit more. It's funny because ChatGPT seems a little bit more off today. Write, rewrite it. A less formal or friendly tone. Hey, John. So, you know, I would absolutely never, ever, ever just copy and paste this into into an email, you gotta tweak this, and usually it will pull a little more details. Um, I laugh every single time it says a young entrepreneur. But anyway, you get the point of what we're doing here. You know, it's pretty good at being able to pull— the main value of using ChatGPT is it's pretty good at being able to pull some stuff about that investor, some stuff about you, weave it all together into a nice— see, this is what's weird about it. Like, it's saying, by the way, I noticed you're a wine enthusiast. I'm actually a certified sommelier with which I absolutely am not. So I don't know where it's pulling that stuff. It's kind of making that. So again, you can't really fully trust this, but it's really a good way to like, you know, create more tailored emails. Because if we're going to do cold, this is something I tell people all the time. If you're going to reach out cold, the bar is really, really, really high. I was on a webinar with Jeff Clavier of Uncork Ventures not too long ago. He's a very active angel investor. and a question came up if he had ever invested in a startup that came in over cold email. And he said, yes, I have. Um, we've invested in 2 startups actually that came in over cold email, and— but that was out of 760 portfolio companies. So 2 out of 700+ came in through cold email. So it's not impossible, but it's very, very hard. And many investors really filter as an initial filter how you get to them, right? So that's why the warm intro is so important. And that's why those first two methods, either using LinkedIn or reaching out to a portfolio company founder and trying to get an intro, is much more effective. But if you're going to do cold email, I've done some myself, you know, try ChatGPT, or just spend the time researching that investor, being very clear about why you want to reach out to them. Show that you've read their blog, that you've followed them on Twitter, and reference a few things about what they've done. And usually, you know, I'm sure you guys all get a lot of cold email too. You can kind of tell when someone's taken the time to personalize it, and investors are really responsive about that. So method 3 is cold email. Less effective, but still you know, can be effective, especially when, uh, you make it really, really personalized. Okay, one more here and then we can do some Q&A. This is really just a little sample talk. One more is this permission email. Um, I don't know if you can read this very well, uh, but I'll read it like this. Hi, Investor Name, I'm the founder of Insert your name. I'm the founder of Foundersuite. We make software for raising capital. We have 34,000 startups on our platform that have raised $10 billion. Now here's— okay, so the first line is just a little bit, very short teaser about what you do. It's not a pitch about your business. It's not your background on the business. It's, I'm Nathan. I run Foundersuite. We make software for raising capital. Here's an impressive statistic. That's all it is. Okay. Second line, we're not actually raising money right now, but I plan to start raising our seed round in Q3. I've been following you on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I'm really impressed with the last 3 deals you did. I think your investment in in, you know, SaaS space has been dramatic and impressive, and I really like these two startups you've invested in. That will make it clear that you've done a little homework on them. You know what you're talking about. You know, you're not doing a mass blast email. You've clearly reached out. So moving on, we send out a short one-page company update So let me, let me back up. Say once again to emphasize, we're not raising money right now, but we will be later. I'm reaching out to you because I've been following you and I really like you for XYZ reasons. Now here's the ask. We send out a short one-page company update detailing our progress and key highlights. I would love to give you an early look at what we're doing, or you could also say sneak peek, right? If you think about the job of an investor, really their job is to, you know, return 10x their money or their LP's money. How do they do that? They get into the best deals. How do you get into the best deals? Either you have a really awesome brand and reputation like Andreessen Horowitz, or you get in early, earlier than other investors. And so what we're doing here is we're teasing this investor. I would love to give you an early look at what we're building here. And then here's the big ask. May I have your permission to add you to our company update distribution list? Let's take a moment to just reflect on what this email is. This is not an email asking them for money. This is not an email asking them for time. You're not asking for a call. You're not asking for a Zoom. You're not asking for pitch them. All you're doing is asking them if you can add them to your company update distribution list so you can give them a sneak peek of what you're doing. And then what is the best thing to do is actually do this. Don't just, you know, pay lip service to it, is create an investor update, a company update that looks something like this, and do it every month. So as a refresher, you know, just put in a little bit about what you do. This will basically be the same section every single time. Put in what happened last month into this update. Put in some metrics. This is just a dummy account. Put in a screenshot of your product, whatever it is. Physical product, software product, doesn't matter. Put in a screenshot of the product every time. Talk about what you're going to be doing, and then put in a screenshot— or, uh, sorry, an image of your team every single time. Because again, these investors don't know you. So you start to send John Steinberg this update every month, and he can start to see, oh yeah, these guys, Foundersuite, oh yeah, they make this software. Oh, look at this progress. They just landed a deal with, you know, so-and-so big name firm. Or look at their growth. It's really impressive. Their metrics seem to keep getting better and better. The product. Oh yeah, the product. Oh yeah, I remember what they do. He's telling me we're going to do this. These are all exciting things. The next month update, I see that he actually achieved some of this stuff and just putting a face to the name. He sees your face over and over again. And you do this for a couple months in a row and it's amazing, investors actually will start to kind of pick up on what you're doing and you can track, of course, to see, you know, who's looking at your updates, how much time they're spending. And the whole reason we do this is because once you really are ready to raise money, you've built this, Line, not a dot. And this is what it kind of all comes down to. Very few investors will invest just on one meeting or touchpoint. Usually they want to get to know you over a period of some time. They want to see the progress. Each of these dots basically on the right side represents like a company update that you've sent. They see you're making progress. They see your business has actually got some momentum going. And that's when investors love to invest. So this permission email is one of my favorite ways to break the ice without— with investors without asking very much, because they're getting— if you put yourself in the shoes of investors, they're getting asked for stuff all the time. They're getting asked for pitch meetings 50 times a day or more. All you're asking is simply, you know, adding to your distribution list. So that's basically it. You know, to recap, to break the ice with investors, either get a warm intro, get an intro, if you don't have any connections, get an intro through a founder, a founder of someone they've invested in, and that is a stranger to you, but you can build a rapport with founders pretty quickly. Founders are really good about helping other founders, as I'm sure you guys are already aware. Third choice, get, you know, do the cold email. Play around ChatGPT to make it kind of fun. I would put this approach as your last resort though. But 4th and possibly best or maybe equal to the warm intro is this permission email followed by the company update. And once you do that, you will be ready to get momentum going for your raise, which we're not going to get into here. I don't know if we want to mention the full boot camp now, but I will stop sharing my screen and let's see if we have any questions about this, this method approach or anything about fundraising in general.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much, Nathan. Let's kick things off. We have some Q&As coming in, but I think just because I had some people DM me and I thought it would be— I kind of— I've not done this before, but this is kind of my question to you. Just from other people. It's like, hey, if I'm planning to raise funding in 3, 4, 5 months, when should I start emailing investors the permission email?

I love this question. I, I love this question because there's so much to it, and this is actually so powerful. So in a perfect world, you just said you're planning to raise money in 3 months. Okay, that's fine, that works too. In a perfect world, you actually start this permission email process 6 months in advance. So let's see if I wanted to raise money. You know, a lot of investing in the US happens right after Labor Day, which is what, September 1st or so? I don't even know what the dates, but around then. Right. So if you want to start raising money in September, right now is a great time to start doing this. So you can send out an update in April, May, June, July, August, 5 updates. And then in the, uh, the August one, let's say you're kicking off your fundraiser in September, the August one you actually put top of that update, maybe even bold, caps, whatever, we're going to kick off our seed round next month in September. Let me know if you want early access to our pitch decks or our pitch deck. And I've seen this is why I love this hack so much. I've seen deals get swooped up before the founder even goes out to market and starts, you know, talking to lots of investors. I've seen deals get snapped up by those investors on their update distribution list. So 3 months is still fine. You can still kind of do that approach in 3 months, but if you have the luxury of 5 or 6 months, you know, even better. And I've seen, like I said, I've seen startup founders not have to go fundraise because they built such a great distribution list of investors who are following along on their progress that those investors like snap up the deal before they have to go raise money. So imagine if you don't have to spend the next 6 months fundraising because you've got, you know, good investors. Now, 3 months still works. You could still do April, May, June, and then, you know, kick it off the next month, um, But the more time, the better. And if you're already too late in this process, you're like, you're raising money right now, that's okay. Start this process anyway. Like, start the updates. Doesn't, doesn't really— I mean, it does matter. It's better to do it in advance, but it doesn't— it still helps a lot. And of course, once you raise this seed round, start this for your next round. If you're raising Series A, start this process 6 months, uh, building that list of investors for Series A. Reaching out to them, getting the intros you can, doing the permission email for the ones you can't find intros to, and start that whole process. I love that question. Thank you.

Yeah, I thought that was relevant to ask because I've seen a lot of the content you've presented before, so I have a little bit of some background information, but I thought it'd be good for everyone else. All right, folks, we're going to jump into a proper Q&A, jump in, you know, start asking questions of both the ones that you want. I'm going through them, I'll bring them up like I just did, and then we'll try to do, let's say, 5, 6, and then maybe Nathan, you and I can briefly chat about the bootcamp, and then we can break out into networking. So, I'm sorry, just people are asking about the recording and some slides. Yes, we'll send out the recording after this, so you'll all have access to it, so don't worry about it. Let's kind of like this one from Hassan from Lahore, Pakistan. He's asking, he got some feedback it's hard to raise funding, the idea stage, like he's thinking of, he wants to raise funds to develop the idea. I think maybe Nathan, why don't you give everyone here, what landscape are we dealing with here? We're not dealing with COVID where there was a lot of capital. So maybe give some people the lay of the land, if that makes sense.

Yeah, so it's an interesting time, right? We're in, I guess, a recession. I don't know what we're calling it here. Uh, you see these statistics, I read these statistics all the time about the amount of venture capital, how it's just dropped. Like, you see the charts, it's like, you know, 2020, '21, '22, and then like around, call it December, January of 2023, it just like goes, falls off a cliff. And so it's harder, it's way harder to raise capital right now. Now take the macro environment out for a second and just talk about individual startups. So the, the less you have to show, the harder it gets, right? So if you're idea stage, that is a really hard stage to be raising money. Of course, take the opposite of what I just said. The more you have to show, the more product, traction, team, the easier it gets, especially if you have good traction, right? Traction kind of cures all ills. Even if you're missing a co-founder, you really get traction. It gets easier. So idea stage is not impossible, but it gets very hard and people are going to be investing. You know, another way I approach this question is if you did a little pie chart, like what, what is interesting about your business, right? At the idea stage, you better have a big idea and really relevant background because they're investing in the idea and you. There isn't much to show. There's no product, there's no traction. Probably not a full team. So they're investing in the idea and you. So if those two things are really amazing, you can get funded. Otherwise, you probably need to raise some money from friends and family, people who are really not even investing in the idea, just you, right? Because they know you, they trust you, they love you. And that's— I mean, that's how it works, right? I raised $30,000 from my dad and a couple of other relatives when I was first launching Foundersuite. When I had basically an idea. That's what it— that's what helped us get to the next level where we're able to raise a little bit of seed money and then grow it from there. So not impossible, just very hard.

Yeah, look, that was a great, um, great example. All right, uh, John is— sorry, let me— John is asking, you know, what's the implications, are there any negative implications about contacting an investor directly on LinkedIn? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I don't think there is. So, so one thing I didn't mention because we were just making this a short little talk here, but the step before starting the conversation is building the target investor list, right? That's kind of the preceding step, which we didn't get into here because that's a long conversation. But when you're building the target list of investors, I strongly recommend Following each of them on Twitter, either following or trying to connect with them on LinkedIn. Connecting is better, but following is okay. Engaging with them on social platforms that they're active on, right? I don't think there are too many dangers. I would say that many investors, you know, I bet if you logged into their LinkedIn account, there's 4,000 unread messages in their LinkedIn inbox. So I'd say I don't think it's a danger so much. Other than they might not actually ever see your email because, or your message because so many people are coming after them. But if they post something, you know, really interesting and pithy on LinkedIn, add a comment or two. Insert yourself into the conversation. That can be on LinkedIn, that can also be on Twitter, that can also be on other social platforms. So later when you get the intro, from someone or when you do the cold outreach, if they've seen your name a couple of times, like, huh, that guy actually has left some interesting comments on my LinkedIn post. That's great, right? It's kind of like Marketing 101. You know, they say to build a brand, you've got to be exposed to that brand like several times. Kind of the same thing with raising capital, right? If that investor's heard you, seen you, and now is getting intro'd to you, That's great. So I don't see too many dangers.

Okay, perfect. Uh, let me bring this question from Olga. She's asking like, uh, are there any good resources to find a list of investors by their interests or industries? I know you briefly talked about Crunchbase, but for those who don't know about Crunchbase or AngelList, do you just want to give a high-level intro?

Yeah, so this is, this is a, uh, a big topic, right? Building that list of investors is obviously Step number 1, very, very, very critical. The top choices I usually recommend people go to— AngelList is a good place to start. You can search by industry, by, uh, schools, by companies these investors worked at. So if you worked at Google or something, maybe you want to find ex-Google angel investors, things like that. AngelList is good. Crunchbase is good. You can also search there. I would be a bad founder if I didn't plug Foundersuite. We have 214,000 investors in foundersuite.com, soon to be about 270,000, and they're segmented by angel, VC, family office, corporate VC, etc. Signal by NFX is another place. And then if you have some money or you have Access to PitchBook, CB Insights. Those are paid databases you can search on. And then there's tons of other things. This is a whole long, like, 30-minute topic on its own, but there are at least a dozen places to find. But start with those I just listed.

Yeah, for sure. That's great, folks. By the way, I— in the chat, I pinned fi.co/benchmarks. That's a great resource. Of course, go check it out. FI has collected a lot of data on like what some of the early stage investment landscape looks like. Again, fi.co/benchmark, that's pinned to the chat. Go check that out as well because that'll be a helpful one. I wanted to kind of bring this on by Ian Bass asking about permission emails, but like, I guess like what should go, you briefly talked about this, but like what should kind of go into a permission Not unless you see the permission email, but the month-to-month updates. It's like, like you said, you have month 1, month 2, month 3. And I think like this is essentially signaling, if I'm not mistaken, but like for the individuals here who are planning to do this, they're like, hey, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna start sending updates. Like what are some, like at a very high level, and I know you already briefly mentioned it, but I think it's an important topic to revisit. Like what are those top 3, 4 things that a month-to-month, email should have, or month-to-month update should have?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I'm gonna break this into two parts. One is kind of a related question is, you know, people ask me is like, how often should I be sending updates? I said monthly, but that's not for every single startup because if you don't have really any, anything to report every month, then maybe it's every other month, right? So there is a bit of a a cadence that should match, you know, when you have something interesting to report, whatever frequency that is, whether it's every month, whether it's every other month. Quarterly is starting to space them out maybe a little too much. Hopefully you have some news at least every other month. So there's, you know, month to month or every other month, I'd say, or how frequently and when to do it. Now, what should be in that? So I showed this a little bit, but a little company overview, just 2 sentences about what you do. And that is gonna be the same every time. Maybe like I showed that one for Foundersuite, it just talks about what we do and how many users we have. Of course, every month I'm updating how many users we have. And then key wins. You wanna make these updates kind of sexy and exciting and positive and energetic, right? So what happened last month that's good? It could be product development. You released a new product. You're about to release a new product. It could be partnership stuff. You formed a partnership with a big distributor or something. It could be press or PR. Maybe you got written up in TechCrunch. Add that in there. It could be a really key hire. If you recruited the global head of XYZ, That could be really good. It could be growth and traction. That's almost always the best thing to put in there. Even the first bullet, you know, your growth was up 30%, which is more than the 20% the previous month, right? Any trending directional stuff. And then the other things I mentioned, like a little bit about the product, what's coming next month or next quarter, What are the pipeline deals you've got going on? What are the new product releases coming out? And then a team photo. You can add other stuff like little bios on the team and stuff like that, but you want to keep these short. That's the other problem I see sometimes. Founders write these things that are too long and investors won't read it. If they see it's just one little page, you know, they'll skim it, right? They'll skim it on their phone. If they can see this thing goes on and on, they'd probably just skip it. So I would keep it short. I know that's hard to do sometimes.

One thing I'll add to that is like, if you've obviously, if you've graduated from someplace like FI, you can throw that in. The other thing is maybe like advisor updates. Like if you onboard a great advisor in your industry, like throw that in there because that could be super, super helpful. All right, let's do one or two more of these questions and then like we'll start talking about the bootcamp, Nathan. So I like this one. Pauline's asking like, where does, where does revenue fit in into all this? Like, should the startup already be cash, like, generating revenue? Can they be early stage? Like, um, what's your take on this?

You know, it's a little bit like the question of, can I raise money for idea stage companies? Uh, and same answer, right? It's like, the further you get, the easier it gets. Now, some startups don't make money. I mean, if you're doing biotech or pharma, you're developing a new drug, uh, you're not going to see revenue for several years until you get through FDA approval and all kinds of other stuff. However, once you do, you've got your drug patented and you've got 20-year window to, you know, make a ton of money, right? So it kind of depends on the startup. If you are something like an e-commerce or retail business or, you know, something like that, direct-to-consumer, or even SaaS, where it's easy to start making money, then it probably— investors are going to want to see you making some money. So it kind of depends on the business, um, you know. But just because you're not— I mean, there are many startups out there. Let me answer this another way. If you don't have revenue for some reason, you're just too early or your type of business is hard, show other proof points, right? What other market validation items can you show? Either people have signed up for your product on a waitlist, right? People have put down a conditional commitment that once this is launched, they'll buy it, right? I mean, you think about car companies and Ford Bronco, they had, you know, they collected tens of thousands of deposits on their car, right? That's showing even though you don't have revenue around that product yet, there are thousands of people wanting to buy it when it's ready. You can show, you know, maybe you have a free product that you plan to monetize later. If you can show good, good activation and retention metrics around those free people, you might be able to convince investors that you can monetize those later when you flip a switch on that. So figure out what other validation metrics you could put in a pitch deck on kind of a metric slide if it's not revenue.

Yeah, I like that. There's something you have to kind of tell or communicate to show that you have, that you're doing something, right? Over the past few months. And like, I think where a lot of people get confused is like, hey, I'm in idea stage, I'm an MVP, like I need funds to do my idea, I need funds to do my MVP. Like I think a lot of those things get mixed up. We did a webinar this morning with Amit and he talked, he broke it down like, hey, get a clickable prototype, collect customer revenue, build the MVP with that, then go raise money. You know, it was like a little bit more staged and it was a little bit more fixed. So I think that's how people need to be thinking about it. It shouldn't be like, hey, I have an idea, let me go raise a bunch of money to go build it. It's like, well, let's go test the waters first and prove all the risk, like get all the respective data points and then go start raising. Okay, we have a flood of questions coming in. It's gonna be hard to kind of go through all this. I think we're like 25, but like, let's just briefly talk about the bootcamp 'cause I think it's important. So actually, do you wanna just throw the link in there? So folks, first of all, if you've enjoyed Nathan's talk, like you can use the keyboard, think you can press the key number 3 for a thumbs up, number 1 for a clap. Yeah, okay. So we're getting some acknowledgement here, that's great. Yeah, Nate, thank you so much for taking the time of showing these different, methodologies to the founders on this call today. I think, yeah, so just so everybody knows, so Nathan's gonna be running a bootcamp in a couple weeks. So he just pinned it to the chat there. It's called Investor Outreach Bootcamp. This is the first time FI is kind of running this. It's gonna be 3 hours of content like this plus 2 hours of Q&A. So, you know, definitely go check it out. If you're interested, we're going to kind of go significantly more into investor targeting and investor outreach. But I guess, Nathan, like, is there anything specific you want to like, like tell us a little bit about the content you're going to be covering, um, just so everybody knows before they go and click that link?

Yeah, absolutely. So the way I have— yeah, I've been— I mentioned at the beginning of this call, I've been fundraising for 20 years. Like, that was my job out of college. I did it with JP Morgan. In their investment banking group helping companies raise capital. Then I came out to Silicon Valley and spent about 10 years working with startups raising capital. And now I'm doing Foundersuite, which is software for raising capital. So the thing I've, you know, kind of learning over the 20 years of this is treating it like a sales process and really breaking fundraising into the step-by-step process. And step one is building that target list. So that's part of the The bootcamp focus is like, how do we leverage all these databases out there? The things I mentioned, AngelList, Crunchbase, Foundersuite, other sites to identify like the 200 best investors on this planet that are good for your business, right? That's step number 1 on the bootcamp. Step 2 is kind of qualifying them, making sure they're a good fit. And then step 3 is what we've talked about here. And we'll go into a little more detail on some of these topics. Of getting connected to them. And then what happens once you get connected is, you know, you get into pitch meetings and stuff like that. So we'll, we'll talk about getting momentum going on ideas— or sorry, getting momentum going on your deal, uh, how to really get investors like super fired up and excited about what you're doing, uh, and then, you know, how to close it and stuff like that. So we really just take it step by step, like how to how to run a fundraise in a good, proper, efficient way that gives you negotiating leverage, that gives you the control and the power, that puts you in the driver's seat versus being, you know, begging. Right. I always think about this like some founders kind of come out and it feels like they're begging for money and hoping some investor takes pity on them. Others come out and they've done a really good process. They put in the prep work of researching investors. Getting those intros, doing good permission emails, working, nurturing those relationships. And they have all the control and power. They can choose which investors to let into their deal. So it's a, you know, black and white scenario of how to do it right, how to do it wrong. And so that's a lot what we cover in this boot camp, really giving you the tools to run a good fundraise and get the money. So.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for kind of giving that plugin. Folks, we're gonna wrap things up, right? We have about 10 minutes left. What we're gonna do is we're gonna jump into networking tables. I'll be on a table. Nathan, if you can stick around, maybe stay at your table for about 10 minutes. Let people come ask you questions. I'm happy to answer questions around the bootcamp, around FI, on fundraising, whoever wants to chat. We can kind of do it from there. But just to wrap things up, folks, give Nathan some love with the emojis. Like, I think if you press number 2, the heart sign comes up. But yeah, Nathan, thanks for taking the time. And then, you know, feel free to connect with myself. I'm sure Nathan's available on LinkedIn as well. We've thrown his URL. But yeah, Nathan, any final words for the audience?

No, you know, I think, Coming at this, whether you join the boot camp or whether you, you know, learn this whole process another way, um, coming at this in a good structured way reduces a lot of the stress for founders. It's very hard to raise money. It's very hard. It's much harder than you think it's going to be when you're reading TechCrunch or whatever. Um, and so learning how to do it, it's— I tell founders, like, it's not rocket science. Anyone can learn it and master it pretty quickly. You just kind of have to figure out the little nuances 'cause it has a lot of little details to it that aren't always obvious. So if you're going to go raise money, either come to the bootcamp or spend some time kind of educating yourself on how it works so you don't do it wrong and screw it up and become unfundable. So yeah, we hope to see you on the thing, but Yeah, awesome. Good luck.

Yeah, that's great. Great, thanks everyone. We're going to end the session now. See you in the networking table. Take care, everyone.