• Road-To-Capital
  • Posts
  • RTC #43: Fundraising best practice: cutting through the noise

RTC #43: Fundraising best practice: cutting through the noise

Here are my top three pieces of advice from the Road-To-Capital experts

Author

Stephan Freudl
October 08, 2024

👋 Welcome to ‘Road-To-Capital’ your weekly companion on venture capital and startup financing. This newsletter is about understanding how venture capital investors think and act. Follow me for deep dives, exclusive expert talks, and the latest headlines and insights to stay ahead of the curve.

Hi everyone, here is today’s issue at a glance:

Weekly top links → Data-driven pitch deck creation

Report of the week → Industry 4.0 - The future is NOW

Fundraising → Best practice: cutting through the noise

Forwarded this email? Join over 2,000 founders and early-stage investors and sign up now.

👉 Data-driven pitch deck creation. Optimize your deck backed by data (Link) -
My favorite this week

👉 Founder team or idea? What VCs prefer to invest in (Link)

👉 Think you need VC funding to build a startup? Think again. (Link)

👉 This happens after your pitch is successful (Link)

👉 State of Venture Capital in 2024: Boom or Bust? (Link)

👉 70 pitch decks that raised >$1bn in 2024 (Link)

👉 The 5 biggest business trends for 2025 (Link)

📖 Report of the week

  • Learn how new manufacturing technologies will develop by integrating IoT, AI, and robotics.

Fundraising has become a science - with 1,000s of people sharing (and selling) their advice (especially on LinkedIn).

Let us cut through the noise.

What are relevant questions for founders to raise funds successfully?

The following three questions were among the top ones that came up.

I asked the experts from our community for their input:

  • “How to find the right investors?” (Co-Founder of refurbed, raised over $131m)

  • “Shall I engage a fundraising advisor?” (Co-Founder of 3VC, Series A VC fund)

  • “How do you describe an ideal founder profile?” (Co-Founder of PUSH VC, early-stage VC)

Listen to what the experts from the Road-To-Capital community give you as advice.

Advice 1: “How to find the right investors?”

“Always be raising :) I like this quote as it is quite true, you need to continuously build relationships with investors. We met some investors more than a year before they invested - while others decided to invest within a week after the first phone call. It totally depends on the investor and the dynamics of the round. So there really isn’t an average for this process.”

👉 Speak with investors when you don’t need funds. This puts you in a stronger position when you need the funds because “you are in the flow”.

👉 What does this mean for early-stage founders? Speak about your startup and the problem you are solving from day one.

Advice 2: “Shall I engage a fundraising advisor?”

“Advisors are often a sign of founders lacking the ability to raise funds and sell their ideas. They make sense to structure a process or work with more institutional investors.”

👉 This is a tricky topic - especially for early-stage. Founders should maximize the chances to get the right and best investors. Will this happen by outsourcing the entire process to a third party? For sure, not. Would I see a problem if they pay someone for a successful intro? Probably not.

👉 Definitely helpful at a later stage - founders should leverage experts for certain topics and focus on their core tasks.

Advice 3: “How do you describe an ideal founder profile?”

Authenticity of the founder for the problem she/he is trying to solve is very important and also the level of ambition (what did she/he do in the past and what are the plans... should be something between craziness and realism).

👉 Authenticity is tied to “domain expertise” for me - at least one of the founders needs to convince me why his or her experience helped to understand that there is a problem to solve and how to solve it.

👉 No ambition, no success - this is clear. What founders might forget is that this should not only be words and promises when pitching, it needs to be proven already in the past by actions.

Interested in more? 🤓

Have a look here where I talk about “my” top 4 rules for making an early-stage investment

RTC #16: The 4 top rules you NEED to follow to secure VC money

Plus: Venture capital term sheet guide 2024

www.roadtocapital.co/p/issue-16

Thank you for reading today’s issue. If you enjoyed it, leave a like or comment, and share it with your friends. Follow me on LinkedIn to never miss updates again.

Have a great week,
Stephan 👋

Issue #43 | 8 October

📝 Your thoughts on today's issue?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Reply

or to participate.