Most founders never actually decide when their fundraise starts or when it ends.

Here's how it usually goes:

They build a V1 pitch deck which is good enough to send. Then they email a couple of investors and wait for feedback.

A delayed reply comes back to them three weeks later. They change some slides, answer a few questions, email two more and wait again.

Without realizing, it's been 5-8 months and they've spoken to maybe a dozen investors. They still don’t have a term sheet. They didn’t manage to build momentum with investors and on top of that their company’s traction is suffering. 

I call this the “Perpetual Fundraising”. And it has the strong potential to wipe out any company.

Every week you spend in this limbo is a week you're not building your startup.

It’s a dangerous tradeoff - you're not shipping new features, nor selling to new customers, nor hiring or getting better at the actual job of running the company.

You end up waiting for a few investors which will most likely never reply.

This whole thing ends up taking way over 5-8 months. Your startup’s traction is declining because you stopped building the company. And mediocre traction makes the raise even harder. It’s a vicious circle.

Meanwhile, money in the bank is decreasing. 

I’ll not allow this to happen to you. There’s a better way.

The founders who are exceptional at fundraising treat fundraising as a campaign with a clear start and a clear end. Fast, concentrated, and very intensive.

I call it a “Blitz Raise”. 

The whole concept steps on one idea: you prepare everything you’ll need in advance (company, traction, pitch deck, data room, warm intros, etc.) and the actual investor outreach and pitching is a well-timed, intensive campaign which you run within several weeks at scale.

I don’t really know why anyone would do it any different way.
It saves you so much time and energy

Preparation
This is the foundation of your campaign.
I’ll get into details below, but on a high level you’ve got to prepare the following things: your company; your pitching materials; your data room materials and your investor outreach systems.

Timing
There are two best periods in the year to start a Blitz Raise investor campaign:

1. end of September - end of November (be mindful of Thanksgiving in the US)
2. end of January - end of May (be mindful of Easter)

Scale
Fundraising is like sales - you can’t expect to sell your product to the first 3 customers you speak to - you need volume. So you will be speaking to investors at scale. The goal is reaching out to at least 100 investors, so you can get 1-2 term sheets.

Intensity
You want to pack as many investor meetings as possible in a tight time frame.
We can’t be waiting for investors to come back, you’ll have to create FOMO in their heads (with different tricks) so they move fast and compete. They should feel it’s a hot deal and other VCs could steal it from them.

Phase 1: Preparation (roughly 6-8 weeks, before you talk to a single investor)

Please, don’t skip this phase. I know it takes time and it’s frustrating to do it, but trust me on this one - better do it in advance than having to whip up a financial model or market deep dive in the middle of investor conversations. To make it easier follow my free 44-step preparation checklist.

You pretty much prepare three aspects:

Prepare the company - fix any red flags, get a good trajectory on the traction, align with the team, build a good story and generally, as a mentor of mine used to say “get the house in order”.

Prepare the materials - imagine investor deck, elevator pitch, a well structured data room with a financial model, market and competitor deep dives, product information, past performance numbers and so on.

Prepare the investor outreach campaign - a defined Ideal Investor Profile, investor lists to match this profile, well structured outreach emails, Superconnector and warm intro lists, a CRM to track the process, etc.

Phase 2: The Blitz (from a few to 4-8 weeks at the absolute most)

This is where you actually start fundraising, you officially open the round. Your focus is to go wide and fast - pack investor meetings into one tight window and run them in parallel, not one at a time.

In advance block your calendar for a few weeks and aim to create a density of meetings. 

Actively communicate to investors that you: a) are talking to many investors at once and b) are aiming to close the round promptly and go back to building.

That's the whole trick. When investors sense other investors circling the same deal and that you’re moving fast, you get FOMO, urgency, and competing offers.

You run the Blitz until you get a term-sheet you’re happy with and fill the entire round.
(I’ll cover the term sheet dynamic in details in a further issue)

Phase 3: Closing (give it 6-8 weeks, and expect it to run long)

Once you get and sign a term-sheet, you are obliged to stop talking to new investors (a standard clause in most term sheets). So your entire attention goes into two things:

a) the due diligence process which investors run - making sure that everything checks out. Most times they dig deeper into legal, financial and technical matters. 

b) the final documents of the deal - Shareholders’ Agreement and others.

(More about closing at the due diligence process in a future edition.)

The difference between a founder who raises in 8 weeks and one who's "been raising" since spring, usually comes down to one thing: whether they ran the raise as a campaign or as a side hustle.

(btw. I’m not referring to the rare cases of ex-Anthropic, SpaceX, OpenAI employees who get thrown money at.)

So pick your start date. Pick your (desired) close date. Do the prep. Then hit the market hard and don't let it drag for ages.

Then you get back to building your company.

That's all for this week.

See you again on a Thursday soon.