Today, we’re talking about fundraising momentum. Generating momentum matters in fundraising, no matter what stage you’re at.

Today, we’re talking about leveraging small checks to find a lead for your seed round.

In November 2018, PlanGrid, a SaaS startup in Construction, announced they were acquired by Autodesk for $875M. When reading about this kind of huge success for a startup, it’s easy to forget their humble beginnings.

Today, we’re talking about how large customers can change your strategy. When you’re just getting started a large customer with deep pockets can seem understandably attractive.

Today, we’re talking about delivering bad news to investors.

Today, we’re talking about a phrase founders hear a lot during seed fundraising: “I’m in, if you find a lead investor”.

Today, we’re talking about dealing with lots of investor interest. If you’re lucky enough to be in a position of strength and getting lots of inbound demand for your fundraise — that’s great — but it’s easy to let the inbound emails you’re receiving dictate your process.

Today, we’re talking about following up. Always follow-up with an investor. Sometimes it’s hard to do that 3rd follow up with an unresponsive investor but you must summon the energy.

Today, we’re talking about false economies at your startup.

Today, we’re talking about the amount of research and email you need to do during seed fundraising. I often tell founders trying to raise a seed round of $1M+, that they should aim for at least 15 meetings a week for the first 6 weeks.

This is the 3rd part of a series on sales channels your startup can use. The previous Parts 1 and 2 dealt with ads, your network, conferences, channel sales, referrals and content marketing. In this final part we will review: cold emails, customer advisors, consulting, and communities.

Today, we’re talking about the typical journey startups take with their internal CRM.

Today, we’re talking about the 3 plans you need for Seed fundraising.

Today, we’re talking about European startups pursuing US investors for their seed round. I meet a lot of startups doing this and I can completely understand why it’s an attractive strategy.

Today, we’re talking about the most common fundraising mistakes I see from more experienced entrepreneurs. When you have a lot of experience in startups it’s easy to forget the basic fundamentals, especially when you’re under pressure.

Today, we’re talking about the basic customer discovery questions. Customer discovery is an essential first part of the sales and product development process but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t know what questions to ask.

oday, we’re talking about why you should NOT include projections in your deck’s traction graph. The traction graph is where you get to show off all the progress your company has made in recent months. If you include projections in this graph, you create 2 problems.

Today, we’re talking about how you to prove your app has a better experience to an investor. Many entrepreneurs claim their competitors are “terrible to use” and their app is “a great experience”. But your claims are unlikely to be enough.