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. Most people underestimate just how much work is required to get that many meetings:
First of all, you’ll need to research your potential target investors and make a list of roughly 50.
Now we need to find a route to these potential investors. Given you won’t be connected to all of them and some don’t publish their contact info, you should expect to find a way to reach about 60% of your targets — so roughly 30 intro requests.
Not everyone you reach will want the introduction, so again expect at most 60% of these connection requests to be successful — so roughly 18 introductions made.
Even after an introduction is accepted, some meetings just won’t happen — there might be repeated cancellations and reschedules, or they may change their mind after looking at a deck. Here we expect to lose 10–20%. So 18 introductions will result in your goal of 15 meetings.
As you can see, there is a lot to do. My advice is to start early and do the boring work first thing, each day.
