Before you start your fundraise, read this
You've built your investor list. You're about to send the first emails. Stop.
đ Hi, itâs Neal, and Iâm here with a đ„ edition of The Midnight Text, Forum Venturesâ bi-weekly newsletter that provides honest answers to the unspoken questions that keep founders awake at night.
Iâm a Managing Director at Forum Ventures, guiding portfolio founders on the zero to one journey. I am a 2x B2B SaaS founder, and I grew my previous startup to $5M+ in ARR and raised over $30M in capital. I am an engineer by trade and an ultra-generalist in practice. For more stories like this one, please follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to my newsletter.
Every two weeks I run a fundraising prep session with our accelerator founders right before they go live with their raise. In the last session, I asked the room: âWhoâs planning to start with your best investors â your dream funds, the ones you most want on your cap table?â
Almost every hand went up.
Thatâs the wrong answer. But it makes sense why.
Most founders spend months preparing for the pitch: the deck, the narrative, the traction slide, the presentation. A lot less thought goes into the outreach process: who you contact, when, in what order, and how. But the strategy to get in the room is just as important as what you do once youâre there. Get it right and you walk into every meeting with momentum already behind you.
Hereâs what Iâve learned about the fundraising outreach process from raising over $30M, and guiding founders through raises with us at Forum.
Before you reach out: build a ladder, not a list
When youâre building your investor target list, most founders think about fit. They research who invests at their stage, whoâs active in their space, who has a check size that matches. Thatâs all correct. But fit isnât enough. You also need to think about sequencing, as in the order and cadence in which you reach out to your list.
Stack your investors into three tiers:
Tier A â your ideal investors. Strong fit, right check size, youâd be thrilled to have them on your cap table.
Tier B â good fit, slightly less ideal. Maybe theyâre a bit generalist, or the check is smaller, or you donât have a warm intro yet.
Tier C â longer shots. Useful to have in the funnel but not where youâd anchor your round.
Now hereâs the counterintuitive part: start with Tier B.
Your first five or ten investor meetings are not about closing. Theyâre about sharpening your pitch. You will say something wrong. An investor will ask a question you fumble. Youâll realize mid-call that your traction slide lands flat. This happens to everyone. The question is whether you want that to happen in front of your dream investors or in front of people youâre less attached to.
Use Tier B meetings to find the weak spots before you walk into Tier A.
When you reach out: cluster everything
Fundraising is an emotional process, not a logical one. This is the part that surprised me most when I raised my first round. I expected investors to behave rationally â to evaluate my deck, assess the opportunity, and make a clear yes or no decision.
Thatâs not how it works.
Investors respond to momentum. When they see a founder who has four meetings in the same week, who follows up fast, who has other investors asking questions â they pay attention. When they see a founder whoâs been âfundraisingâ for three months with nothing to show for it, they get cautious.
This means the structure of your raise matters as much as the content.
Cluster your meetings. The goal is to run as many investor conversations as possible in a short window â think two to three weeks of intensive outreach. This isnât about tricking anyone. Itâs about the reality that fundraising momentum is real, and you need to manufacture it intentionally.
How you reach out: warm intros as a science
Cold outreach works sometimes. Warm intros work far more often. But not all warm intros are equal.
A warm intro from a founder who knows the partner personally is worth ten times a warm intro from someone who met them at a conference. Think carefully about the source.
Even better: get multiple people to reach out about you to the same fund independently. When three different trusted contacts mention a company to the same investor in the same week, it creates a kind of social proof thatâs very hard to manufacture any other way. It also means the investor has heard your name three times before you even speak.
Before you go live, map your network against your investor target list. For every Tier A investor, ask: who do I know that knows them well? Then time those asks so the intro lands 3-4 days before you want the meeting â close enough that youâre top of mind when the investor opens their calendar, not so early that the intro goes cold while youâre still prepping.
How you follow up
I see founders burning time and credibility on excessive investor follow-ups. Hereâs the rule.
After a meeting: send a thank you and your deck. Thatâs it.
After that: the only reason to follow up is if something meaningful has changed like a new customer, a revenue milestone, a term sheet from another investor. Not âjust checking in.â Not âwanted to see if you had any questions.â Those messages signal desperation, and desperation kills deals.
If an investor is interested, they will move. Your job is to give them a reason to move faster, not to remind them you exist.
The founders Iâve seen close rounds fastest arenât always the ones with the strongest companies. Theyâre the ones who ran a tight, structured process with clustered meetings, sequenced lists, multiple intros to the same funds, and clean follow-ups.
Fundraising is a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with reps. The best thing you can do is set up the conditions to get those reps efficiently.
Go get it.
Neal
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very interesting! this month the newsletters we track are saying capital is available but selective. VCs are writing about quality of founder way more than capital availability.