Congratulations! You've made it to the end of our four-part Funding Series:
Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise
Phase Two - Investor Selection
Phase Three - The Pitch
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Part 1 - Investor Outreach
Part 3 - The Investor Email Pitch
Part 4 - How to Contact Investors ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Let’s dive in!
So you've got your list of angel investors, venture capitalists, random private investors, and even your rich Aunt and you're ready to blast all of them with your email pitch...
Please don't! Step.. away.. from.. the.. keyboard!
Most Founders (and we help thousands) wind up tanking their entire fundraising process the moment they hit the "send" button to potential investors. That'...
As a startup founder, one of the biggest keys to success is being able to leverage marketing to garner awareness and grow your business. This means taking stock of all potential marketing channels and deciding which ones are the best fit for you.
Chances are, especially if you’re bootstrapping, that digital marketing is the first thing that came to mind. In general, the barrier to entry with digital marketing is much lower and there are many ways for you to market yourself for free—if you’re willing to dedicate the time and energy.
If you’re new to SEO, or if you are needing to brush up on your skills, you’re in the right place. Our SEO for b...
As a startup company, pricing a project, your work or your time, is a difficult task, and one you will face from the get go in your business adventure. From experience, it is easy to underprice, and for whatever reason, easy to underprice regularly, again and again, and believe me, you will tire of concluding that “we are too fucking cheap!” after a while.
Pricing work correctly is no easy feat, when you have to consider questions such as the following; What is the rate you want to earn? Should you charge day rates, rather than hourly rates? What would your wage be? (Note: you will want to write ‘ten million pounds’ here, unfortunately it is probably some way short of that.) What do your ...
One year. Did you know that’s the average tenure of an employee at giants like Google and Amazon?
When the average salary for a Google software engineer is $111,149, you can’t really argue that the tech giants underpay their employees. So why do good employees leave high-paying jobs so quickly, and what can companies do to combat it?
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile conducted a study observing the daily activities and motivations of several hundred employees over the course of a few years and found external incentives, such as salary and perks, have little to do with employee tenure.
She notes, “the key to motivation…doesn’t depend on elaborate incentive systems” at all. In fact, Amabile’s study revealed the top mo...
What matters most to your employees?
This is the third time we are asking that question, because what could be more rewarding and fruitful than fostering a supported and thriving workforce?
Every year we review the Society for Human Resource Management’s Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement Report, an enormous undertaking that produces nearly sixty pages of data on what employees want most, how responsive their employers are, and what they need to be engaged in their work. This year, we are including the infographic below, courtesy of our friends at Venngage.
The 2016 report was based on responses collected from 600 randomly selected employees between November and December of 2015. SHRM found these themes topped the list of those that ...
We're all probably a lot less liked than we think — and that's probably OK.
As Founders, we're automatically put on a pedestal, and that pedestal is sometimes used to praise us, and other times to set us up to have rotten tomatoes thrown at us! Either way, we tend to stand out in the organization. In a perfect world, we'd be universally praised and admired. Our staff would love everything we do and only talk nicely behind our backs. But the world isn't perfect, startups are a grind, and the constantly changing floor beneath our feet creates a metric ton of resentment.
But instead of worrying about whether we're going to be universally loved like Kanye, let's talk about what to do about it in the infinitesimal chance we're not.
How much money do we need to be rich?
It's an important question as Founders because our financial goals and appetite for risk are inextricably tied to the decisions we make in building our startups.
The problem with determining what "rich" is to us is that there's rarely a hard limit on how big that number can be. In some cases, we may even feel ashamed to state it out loud, for fear that we're either too high ("you jerk!") or too low ("slacker!").
The thing is — it doesn't matter. In most cases, we're really not talking about "being rich" as a goal, what we're really talking about is being "safe". We want to know that our bills will get paid, our loved ones will get taken care of, and if shit hits the fan (because eventually, it always do...
Legendary Founder stories are great — unless you're the poor bastard who had to live through it.
As Founders, we're regaled constantly of comeuppance stories of our fellow Founders who risked it all... almost lost it all... and then won it all in the end. It's entertaining, inspiring, and sometimes even true.
Often we wish we could have such an epic story ourselves. But what we rarely comprehend in those stories is that in order for the story to be so epic, someone had to go through a massive amount of pain to be able to tell it.
The reality of that pain and suffering is not only overlooked quickly but entirely justified by the outcome. But does that make it all OK?
Recently a good friend of mine shared a tale of...
For as much as we startup Founders love to innovate business models, we sure have done a lousy job of innovating on the employment model. Our salary lines tend to be our single largest expense in a company, and yet the biggest innovation we've had to date has been moving to a remote work system.
We've agreed that we don't need offices or "40-hour work weeks" anymore, so why haven't we agreed that we don't need the "full-time salaries" that came with them?
(Gasp!)
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, I'm about to be exponentially less popular. And, well, I wasn't that popular before, so… But seriously, why haven't we reconsidered compensation in an era where everything has become fractionalized?
Very few people actually work full-time an...
From startups like Allbirds and Harry’s to larger companies like Tesla, the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business model is becoming increasingly popular.
Today, the supply of consumer products greatly outstrips the demand that exists in the market. As a result, consumers are demanding a new experience that big box retailers and other “middlemen” simply can’t provide. Companies want a way to reach consumers directly and control every aspect of that experience.
The rise of D2C companies follows off the back of what General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja refers to as “economies of unscale.” Modular services have greatly reduced the barriers to launching a D2C strategy. Back in the early 2000s, it was difficult for an e-commerce startup to build and man...