Step 4: How to Keep Up Momentum in Your Raise

hey there my name is Kelly Nyland I'm the founder and CEO at Whym a software company and I am doing a fundraising series to help Founders like you either raise more money start raising money or apply some best practices if you're in the middle of fundraising and you've kind of stalled out so this is step four in uh the fundraising series and today we're going to talk about running your process so first and foremost this is really your process and you need to understand how long it's going to take to get forward momentum with your investors and at the very end we'll talk about the

Cadence of interest and how you can start to identify how long it should really take how take to get investors through each part of your process so that you can understand if investors are actually interested and they're moving through your process at a proper clip okay so a lot of today's messaging is going to be focused on email because email is a primary communication in the last step we assembled all of our materials and the materials as you can see in this step are going to be really important because they are really the drivers of the conversation the communication and keeping investors interested in and

learning along the way more about your business so the first thing you're going to assemble is Affordable email it has some key components here so I'm going to show you the anatomy of this email in the next section this affordable email is going to go to that list that we described in seep two of all of those uh connectors that you have that are willing to either introduce you to investors or you're going to start directly reaching out through those crunch based contacts to the proper Partners at each of the firms that you're interested and speaking with after you have gone through the qualification process

okay so here is your for aable email this will go to let's say Kelly and I would say hey Kelly it would be really great if you could introduce me to Charles at precursor underneath my signature I paste the forwardable email and that makes it easy for someone to forward the email along to the person that they're going to introduce you to and they have all the information that they need to make a decision about whether they want to speak to you or not so this is uh this is the anatomy of the email that I like to create so so at the very top

it's just a product oneliner helping somebody understand are we even in the right Zone here to be talking to each other um the next section is probably mentioning other like companies or folks you integrate with or um other companies in the industry that are you know kind of Blazing a path for your overall total addressable Market um and and putting yourself in the mind of investors as it relates to those those other key um key companies and maybe even introducing how you're a little bit different than them or how you're similar so uh other like companies just establishing right up front something that feels familiar

and focused and then uh the next couple sections are about creating a couple one to two liners around efficacy efficacy of your product or the planed efficacy for your product traction uh or let's say beta testing user examples user stories and then a little bit about the team so this should give the investor an overview of what they're going to cover when they first meet you I would of course include the send ahead docsend link that we talked about in step three so you're going to create an individual link for every affordable email that you know is going to go to a specific investor and

that way you're going to be able to track whether that investor has indeed looked at your deck um and then you'll also be able to follow up with your contact that is sending this email along to say you know hey Kelly I see that Charles clicked on the link is there any way that you could follow up with him and connect us or just see if he's interested and then at the bottom you want to make it easy to schedule time with you so just include that c Lee link and you'll bee of the game okay so then really the goal of the first meeting

is of course to get the second meeting so when you follow up on that first meeting you're going to want to send your company overview or the executive summary your extended deck so send the send ahead deck that you would have sent in the affordable email but include the extra slides that are related to the materials that we talked about setting up before and um that will give the investor a little bit more comprehensive overview let's say you have 10 slides in your send ahead deck and maybe you add another four to six slides on relevant things that you know investors are going to ask

or have FAQs around round so you're automatically being a little bit proactive and following up and then a product overview so what does the anatomy of this first email uh look like and hopefully you'll get the hang of it after this but of course you're going to send your executive summary and the extended deck in a docon link that way if you uh if the link expires or you stop talking to this investor you can just turn it off no problem and then I like to do product overviews or if you don't have a product in Market you can of course use figma all of

your figma screens to show the demo of the product and uh and then of course your calendly link the next uh email that you're going to want to get uh sent out to the investors is something that teases them about what you're planning to cover in call three usually that has to do with again more of the sophisticated conversations that you need to have around how do you plan to go to market how do you plan to spend the money what's your Merchant adoption going to look like and what is your um competitive landscape so this is a great way to get a second call

you can kind of mix and match your materials here you may get a sense of what investors are looking for from you um in that second or third call followup so again this is the followup you're following up with the go to market maybe gross scenarios financial model by call three and then uh then we go from here so I know a lot of Founders get a little bit stuck once they know they have interest they've been on the phone with investors multiple times they're looking through uh materials and sometimes the process tends to stall out so what are some of the things that you

can do to keep up momentum in your sales process with fundraising because of course we talked about before that fundraising is just a sales process it's just just a different kind um so one thing that I like to throw in is this in Market product demo so a list of places is where investors can either go buy my product or see my product online or test it out themselves of course lots of investors um are user testers themselves they find themselves very good judges of whether consumers or users will be interested or like to use the product so this is a great way to get

their Buy in um and then also I like to uh have an email ready that is related to the latest adoption traction maybe testimonials or endorsements uh from my particular customers and um again this is just another email that you can send out to engage that's not an email that says like hey are you interested what you're doing is you're educating them about your business and you're educating them about the things that are actually important to you about your business the fact that your you your customers love you and that you're focused on that traction is a is a really positive signal the last thing

um this is mentioned also in some of the blogs and medium articles I've seen out there this is my version of more of a fomo or her mentality email that sometimes I send so helping investors understand that they're going to be already with a great group of people that have vetted you so your list may not be very long but you can um call out the different either places or organizations or companies that your angels and your investors um your early investors uh are you know where the firms that they're at and this is a great way to help investors feel like they're already a

part of a community and that a lot of smart people have looked at you and invested in you then this is a this is going to be a you know a little bit more of the diligence sort of being done in the background for you the last one I want to mention is just terms in urgency so as soon as you know this is a all of these emails are a little bit older and so I've was good to sort of show you guys what um this could look like once you do actually have terms or if you're setting terms as a part of your

safe or your other financial instruments it's good to just kind of put that out there as a last step and just say hey you know here's where we're at here's what we're raising and uh we already have this much committed uh would you like to participate so this is a great email to just sort of button up your process if if you're not sure where you are in your process this is a great way way to really find out uh and then just kind of bouncing back up here to our our uh running process so we covered all the affordable emails how to uh what

you're going to send along for your warm intros and how to run that process um what to send ahead and schedule uh for as far as your calendly link is concerned all of your leave behind materials that you're ready to send and the last thing is just Cadence of Interest so in terms of cadence of interest uh I like to say that for the most part I have seen that a three-week process is very good momentum in your process maybe four weeks and that is always that's just a rule of thumb it's not necessarily um always the standard for every investor that you'll meet some

investors may be in the middle of closing deals and so they take a little bit longer um but in general if the investor is interested you should be getting on the with them once to one to two times a week depending on schedules so try to keep your calendly link pretty open and free so that you can know that there's lots of availability for them to choose from and um you should be you know kind of in this process at least one phone call and several touch points questions going back and forth uh links getting opened documents getting reviewed uh even seeing you know hopefully

have a a slack Channel set up for um product notifications for different things that happen in the product if you're a software company or shipping notifications if you are a brand and those should be all you know signals of interest from the investors and that should be moving along within a three to four week process if you go beyond that I would you know really challenge you to find uh to to dig in with the investor and just ask you know is this really like a great for you they may be super transparent and say you know I'm I'm just kind of stuck with this

other deal or you know I'm not convinced around these couple things within your business and that may draw some additional insights that you can use to either answer those questions as a follow-up when you go to your next investor to make sure that you have a lot of those items that that investor is asking for either covered in your FAQs your appendix or potentially to bring those things up sooner in your pitch decks to address things that investors are thinking about so if you see Trends that's a great way to improve your overall pitch improve the Cadence of uh of how you're pitching and uh

and that's pretty much it so good luck and again this is my contact information so if you're enjoying the series and you want to share this with another founder I would love that uh this is my contact information here thanks again