Entrepreneurship

Series A Funding Strategy Guide

series A funding image

A proven strategy guide on how to raise Series A funding for your startup.

Are you a CEO / Founder looking Series A Funding? Or for that matter any kind of funding Seed/Series B…?

Well then your goal is to raise the dollars you need, from the VCs you want, and in the least possible amount of time so you can get back to building the business. Easy right? LOL.

You know as well as I that fundraising sucks…

…and I sucked at it for a long long time.

Series A Funding: It’s Hard

Series A Funding is hard to get, and it’s going to be near impossible if you don’t have a strategy on how to raise capital. In 2017 when I was raising pre-seed capital from VCs for SIERA.AI, I struggled to go beyond the first meeting. I was rejected by over 30 VCs. Looking back, the lack of traction was not my problem (I was raising pre-seed afterall), the problem was that I didn’t have a strategy on how to conduct the fundraising process.

Eventually, through 2018-2020 I raised angel capital and was able to do that with much greater success than with VCs. Internally, I still felt quite upset and honestly, ashamed that I couldn’t convince a VC to invest.

In the summer of 2020, I decided to take a hard look at how I was fundraising. I knew that my business was growing, but I didn’t have the flair or the chops to impress investors. So I sat down, wrote down all my chokepoints and starting getting help from my brother who was at that time an intern at a Venture Capital firm. Through his insights, I was able to craft the initial messaging and story that helped me secure $2M in venture capital.

But I still wasn’t happy. The fundraise took too long (4-6 months), I couldn’t focus on the business as much as I wanted and I vowed to myself to never go through that again.

My Fundraise Strategy Guide

In fall 2021, I decided to write down all the advice from coaches, friends, blogs, and my own experiential learnings into one fundraising strategy guide. This guide synthesizes all my 4 years of learning from the mistakes I’ve made pitching to over 100 VCs into ONE easy to follow guidebook for your own fundraise.

👉 Click here to download my Ultimate Series A Funding Strategy Guide.

What do you get in this strategy doc?

  1. Learn how to indentify the right investor.
  2. Learn how to craft your story/pitch to impress investors in 1 call.
  3. A list of commonly asked questions and how to answer them.
  4. A list of keywords you should use when talking to investors.
  5. A list of metrics and datapoints you need to prepare for your pitches.

Now, every day I spend 15 minutes reviewing this strategy doc. I also spend 5 minutes re-reviewing it before each investor call. I have literally moved investor calls if I did not have time to review this.

The results have been phenomenal, I was able to get all my round commitments done in less than 8 weeks with the round being oversubscribed!

Obviously, traction, product, and everything else were there to back me up, but without a strategy, I was just always underprepared to answer VC questions.

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