the hacker's guide to fundraising

The Hacker’s Guide to Fundraising

by: Fletcher Richman, Platform Manager for Galvanize Ventures

Fletcher Richman Platform Manager for Galvanize Ventures

I’m creating a series of guides on how to hack the processes people normally do by hand, allowing for massive time savings and improved results.

Using a combination of productivity hacking tactics, web scraping tools, creative data sources, and scripting calls, I promise I’ll save you tons of time.

Find Investors Outside of Your Network


To start, a great strategy is to find as many companies as possible who have received investment recently who are in some way similar to your company.

• Similar Location • Similar Vertical • Other Characteristic

One of the best places to do this is on AngelList.


E X A M P L E : Let’s assume you are starting a Colorado based SaaS company. Find all Colorado based startups on AngelList who have raised money

• Go to angel.co/companies • Set filters:

• Location is “Colorado” (or wherever you want) • Type is “Startup” • Under ranges set the lowest amount of funding received to be at least $10k

so that it only shows funded startups. • Export to get a list of funded companies in your area.

http://angel.co/companies


Our goal is to find the people who invested in these companies. We’ll query the AngelList API for each of these companies, and figure out who their investors are. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to code, I’ll handle that part.

• Create a new app on AngelList’s API, here: https://angel.co/api/oauth/clients. • Once you’ve created your app, you’ll need token that is created. You can set the

two URLs to be anything (http://google.com is fine if you aren’t feeling creative.)

https://angel.co/api/oauth/clients

No More Copy and Pasting


Next up, I’m gonna give you a little script that runs through your list of companies and spits out a list of investors.

This script finds the first and last name of investors listed on those companies AngelList profiles, and gives you a list of their website (if available) and AngelList profile.


Use it at: gum.co/alhack

http://gum.co/alhack


How to run the script (you’ll need a Mac): • Download

• Unzip it and open up the file called al_investors.rb using a text editor (I prefer Sublime Text).

• Add your list of investors by copy pasting the list of AngelList URLs from the csv you downloaded into the appropriate line near the top of the file.

• Add your token from the application you just registered at angel.co/api.


The top of your file should look something like this, with more companies and your own API key:


Now, open up your Terminal application on your Mac. Run the following two commands to change directories to the appropriate folder and run the task:

cd ~/Downloads ruby al_investors.rb

If you run into trouble with the second line of code, double check that it is the correct file name and make sure the edits you made with your API Key and list of URLs are in the file called “al_investors.rb” in your Downloads folder.


Check your downloads folder for a CSV called “investor_names.csv”. It should look something like this:

Get in Touch With Potential Investors


I’d recommend setting a simple but robust tracking system, or CRM. My personal, free preference is Streak – it keeps track of stages right inside of gmail, handles mail merge, and its free for up to 5 collaborators, with a limit on shared boxes (up to 50).


Install it from their site, then create a new pipeline:


It will automatically create a pretty solid set of stages for you, my only two edits are to • change “Sent Demo” to “Needs

Follow up” • and added a column after “Lead” for

“Contacted”


Add any personal connections manually to the appropriate stage of the pipeline to make sure you’re keeping track of everyone.

Import the list of investors from AngelList into your CRM. First, create three new free form columns for your new data – Website, and AngelList Url. Make sure it’s all capitalized correctly. Create one more column: Email Address. Then, select the “Import from CSV” option under more.


All of the rows from the CSV of AngelList investors are now in your Streak Pipeline!


There are two options to get in touch with these investors:

1. Warm Introductions - Ideally, you want to try to get a warm introduction from someone who is excited about what you are doing.

2. Cold Introductions - I’ll show you some cool hacks for how to get their email address and send them a cold email.

Warm Introductions

Warm Introductions

There are two great tools to find a second degree connections to your potential investors.

1. Linkedin 2. Conspire

For Linkedin, do a simple search for the full name of the person in your Streak pipeline. I prefer to use the search view to find mutual connections.

Warm Introductions

For example, here are the search results for Chris Nolet, the first person in my pipeline:

Warm Introductions

I can click the little arrow and see my 2nd degree connections to Chris. This is much quicker and easier than actually visiting his profile.

If you don’t have a second degree connection and the person works for an investment firm or VC, another option is to just search the name of the firm and find out who you are most closely connected with.

Warm Introductions

Conspire analyzes your email and the email of other people who use the service to figure out the frequency of communication and show you the closest connection based on that. You can search by name or by company to find 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

When you do ask for introductions, ask the person to do a double opt-in intro. You should give your connection an email that they can simply copy/paste or forward along to the person who you are asking to be introduced to. This will preserve social capital and make sure that your introductions lead to good conversations.

Cold Introductions

Cold Introductions

For the potential investors whose emails you can’t find, it’s time to get creative. Here are a few great tools:

• Viola Norbert that will find someone’s email address given a first name, last name, and domain.

• Email Hunter is another great alternative to find anyone at a specific company, with 200 free requests per month.

• Twitter can also be a great way to initiate conversation.

Cold Introductions

One final option is to use this email permutator to get all the possible email combinations, paste it into your compose box in gmail, and using both the Rapportive and FullContact plugin to plugin mouse over each email and see if anything comes up. Rapportive only matches on LinkedIn email, and Full Contact is able to match on other social networks.

Cold Introductions

Once you have their emails, reach out with something like this:

Cold Introductions

The goal here should be to get a meeting, not to get them to write a check right away. If they respond and seem interested, the next email should provide them with a bunch of options of times that they can pick from. I like either Assistant.to or Sunrise Meet to make that process simpler.

For your link to your deck, Docsend is wonderful, and will ensure you know who is looking at your deck (it often gets forwarded around internally, which is a good sign).

If you want to create good momentum around your fundraise, try to schedule meetings all in a 1 to 2 week period. Investors talk to each other, and if you’re meeting with them all at once that’s often seen as a positive signal.

Follow Up

Follow Up

As those email go out, make sure to move each person to the Contacted stage in your investor pipeline. Use Streak’s email tracking functionality if you’re interested in whether or not your emails get opened, and then use Docsend to understand who has actually looked at your deck.

Follow Up

• Go back every few days to see who has stalled out in the pipeline, but might have opened the deck or responded to an email and not followed up.

• Give them a quick nudge if you haven’t heard from them in 5-7 days.

• Don’t send more than 2 or 3 emails without a response (that’s just annoying), but don’t be afraid to be persistent.

• If all else fails, you can also try a gif or something else creative in a 3rd or 4th cold email.

Follow Up

It’s up to you to nail those in person meetings, impress the investors, and get some momentum behind your fundraise. This should at least get you past the cold start problem.

the hacker's guide to fundraising

Technology