🚀 How to optimize the fundraising process

3 tactics to optimize the fundraising process

🗓️ Stack investor meetings strategically

• Condense all investor meetings into a focused 4-6 weeks sprint

• Start with investors who are likely to say yes and commit first

• Next, move to investors you don’t particularly care about

• End with the top investors you’re most excited about and really want

• Time partner meetings of one tranche to align with first meetings of the next

🎤 Use earlier meetings to refine the pitch

• Get familiar with the numbers and exude confidence in responses (Eg. “Between 15 and 20%, but it’ll get better over time” is better than “I can’t remember the exact number, let me get back to you”)

• Use “When” instead of “If” to talk about the future of the company

• Apply feedback and proactively address concerns raised by previous investors

🙏 Start with a lower ask

• Fundraising success is often binary: oversubscribed or never closed

• Present a smaller supply (Eg. “We are raising 2M and are already fully subscribed” is better than “We are raising 4M and halfway there”)

• Increase the ask strategically (Eg. Going back with “I know I said $5-7M, but it’s going to be $7-8M” signals demand and creates FOMO)

2 traps to avoid

🚨Changing the ask downward = investor red flag

• Always go up, never down

• Adjusting valuation downwards signals weakness and investors will bail

🚨Fundraising at the wrong time

• Avoid summers and holiday seasons—fundraising dead zones

• Align fundraising with business growth cycles (Eg. September for edtech startups capitalizing on school year ramp-up)

• Positive data-driven updates during fundraising keep investor interest high

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on building investor pipeline

• Target at least 50 qualified investors to raise a pre-seed/seed—some startups take 200+ investor meetings to close $1M

• Leverage tools like Happenstance to source and get referrals to investors

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

💵 Consumer-driven wellness is surging and shifting to a buyer’s market

• $1.8T spend in consumer-driven health, though only 4% is digital

• Wellness is growing up to 10x faster than GDP, with 65% of consumers prioritizing it 

• >50% of consumers are open to paying out of pocket regularly, even for AI and mental health services

• New opportunities include:

  • Decentralized services: Universal health passport, marketplaces for services and providers

  • Pay-as-you-go: Transparent pricing, real time financing, customized insurance

  • Personalized care: Early detection, at-home care, customized treatments