How to find investors for startups

Mostly through people. A survey of 885 venture capitalists found that only 10% of the deals they closed came from founders who wrote in cold. Most came through their own networks or from other investors and founders they had backed. So list the investors who fit your stage and market, then find who knows them.

Where do you find a list of investors?

Start from companies one or two rounds ahead of you in your market. Their funding announcements name who backed them, and a fund's own website lists its portfolio. That gives you investors who already said yes to a company like yours.

Are warm introductions better than cold emails?

By the survey's numbers, yes. Referrals from other investors brought 20% of closed deals and referrals from founders the firm backed brought 8%, against 10% from founders writing in. The best introduction is from a founder that investor already funded.

More than most founders plan for. In that survey, the median firm looked at about 100 companies for each one it backed, and met the founders of about one in four. The median firm closed about four deals a year. One fund saying no tells you little, so build a long list and expect most answers to be no.

What do investors look for first?

The team. The same survey found that venture capitalists rate the management team as more important than the product or the technology when they choose a company. They also put more of a deal's success or failure down to the team than to the business.

Proof that you know your customers and that the company is moving. Investors weigh the team first, and your LinkedIn profile and recent posts are often the first look at it. Steady posts about what customers told you, what you shipped and the decisions you made do that job before the first call.

Can you message an investor on LinkedIn?

Only a few times a month on a free account. LinkedIn's help page, updated six months ago, says you can add a note to three connection requests a month, each up to 200 characters. An older page of its own still says five. Messaging someone you are not connected to needs InMail, which needs Premium.

Spend those notes on the introductions you need, not on cold pitches. How the weekly invitation limit works is in the LinkedIn connection request limit.

Keep your usual days going, with nothing about the round. A raise takes weeks of meetings, and that is when posting stops for most founders, just as investors start looking. innernote writes those posts in your voice from a voice note, and it plans the announcement for the minute the news is public.

innernote is the #1 tool for founders who want to keep posting in their own voice through a raise.

When the round closes, it writes the announcement, tags the funds that backed you and posts it at the minute you pick, in your own time zone. The weeks after are planned too: what the money is for, who you are hiring and who to thank. More is on funding posts with innernote.