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Welcome to Phase Four of a four-part Funding Series — all about Investor Outreach:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

• Part 1 - Investor Outreach ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 2 - Investor Introductions: How to Get Them

• Part 3 - The Investor Email Pitch

• Part 4 - How to Contact Investors

Let’s dive in!

Investor outreach strategy is an art form. Many founders will think about their investor outreach program as simply "carpet bombing" prospective investors with the same company story — which never, ever works for startups.

Instead, let's talk about how to build any investor outreach strategy that is customized toward highly specific target investors in a way that will make ou...

Building an online community is no easy task, but the reward in doing so is worth the effort put into it. If you have built one before, you already know that online businesses not just should be, but NEED to be monetized. Online communities are a lot of work, after all, and nobody wants to work for free (right?!).

Facebook Groups are a great way to create an online community and build trust with potential customers. In this article, we are going to dive into how to start a group (for those ready to jump in) and offer all the different avenues of revenue that can be utilized on the platform with helpful insight from members of the Startups.com community.

Starting Your Group

Starting a Facebook Group is the easy part — especially if you are alre...

Welcome to Phase Two of our four-part Funding Series — all about Investor Selection!

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

• Part 1 - Introduction to Startup Investors (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 2 - How to find Startup Investors 

Phase Three - The Pitch

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

This article is an Introduction to Startup Investors. Let's dive in!

Whatever stage your business is in when you launch your fundraising efforts, you can find the investor support that you’re looking for. Now that you’ve determined the fundraise structure that matches your needs and goals, it’s all about finding the investors that make sense.

All investors are not created equal. 

They may all have capital, but the vast majority of i...

Founder: The person who started the company. It is someone who has an idea and creates a business around that idea. They are the “Founding Father” or "Founding Mother" of the company, as the company would have never existed without them creating it. They are often focused on vision and big picture of the start up. They are generally the business owner, or at least one of them.

CEO: The head of the company, responsible for overseeing all aspects of it and making sure everything runs smoothly. The Chief Executive Officer runs it as a business, sets the long term plans and drives towards success. They also communicate directly to the board of directors. A Professional CEO will have the distinction of having risen through the ranks, and brings ...

Startup culture has gone from glorifying victory to glorifying effort.

"Hustle Porn" has become more and more popular, particularly on social media, where would-be champions of entrepreneurship proclaim their insane personal sacrifices to the Gods of Startups. We're constantly wooed with tales of Founders putting in insane hours, risking it all, and coming away with the spoils of success to show for it.

How much of this is really a celebration of hard work and is how much is just the equivalent of giving ourselves a Participation Award for effort?

"I just put in 100 hours this week!"

Let's start by debunking the myth that working 100 hours in a week is somehow a victory to be lauded — it's not. The intention is that we're SO dedicated to ou...

Startups can only be great at one thing — if we're even that lucky.

One of the greatest challenges in our early days is that our ideas for new features and strategies far outweighs not only our resources but the amount of progress we've made on our core product itself. We'll sit in strategy sessions saying, "Oh boy! What if we added this feature, or went down this path! Now that would be incredible!" without realizing our big ideas are actually going to be the death of us.

What we fail to understand is that great companies are built by maintaining a razor-sharp focus on their core product with an unrelenting drive to be the absolute best at that one thing, at the expense of all other distractions. Great Founders have the ability to never lo...

A customer journey map can be an incredibly helpful tool for your business. These maps outline every step that your customer goes through while engaging with your company, from learning about you for the first time to making repeat purchases. A customer journey map helps ensure that your customers are the center of your marketing — it should include touchpoints, frustrations, purchasing motivations, and the like. Creating one can help you identify pain points and keep your customers engaged throughout their buying process.

In this article, we’re going to outline how you can create a customer journey map for your inbound sales funnel.

Start by defining your buyer personas

Before creating your customer journey map, you need to build and defi...

What if our current startup success can't be repeated?

As Founders, we're ridiculous optimists, and for all of our "vision" we're pretty damned short-sighted. In our minds, if things are going this good now, it stands to reason that they will go even better in the future. It has to, right? We'll be better connected, more experienced, and way more prepared than we were for our current startups!

But that's not how startups work. The startup game isn't chess, where the conditions are similar and we're just more experienced. It's more like blackjack, where we know a little bit more, but the variability changes on every hand.

Don't Know What You Got, Til It's Gone

(If you sang this last headline in a Cinderella power-ballad, you are my people). ...

Who cares how fast we can scale if we're not around long enough to do it?

That was our motto at Startups.com since Day One. While it's a ton of fun to think of grand growth strategies to take over the world, it kinda helps to be solvent enough as a company to see them through (at least that's what we've heard). What we've developed over the past decade are essentially two strategies for every major initiative — a "Downside Strategy" where we plan out the worst that could happen and an "Upside Strategy" which considers growth.

Most startups don't actually do this. Instead, we have basically a growth strategy and then in the back of our minds, we sort of formulate this "Oh Shit! Strategy" which loosely envisions what could happen if this does...

As Founders, when we give away equity determines how much we're going to lose.

That's because the equity game, and our job of holding on to it for dear life, is really about vulnerability. The more vulnerable we are, the more we give away. The stronger our position is, the more we retain. It's really that simple, and yet, especially if this is our first startup, it's hard to realize when we're giving up too much too early.

There are really three moments in time where we have to really consider our timing and our approach — when we add co-founders, hiring early employees, and when we take on seed capital. What we often don't realize is that there is a lot of strategy to when and how we pull these triggers, while a lack of strategy has massiv...