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How I Turned a Cold Email into a $2.5M Seed Round

28 points by r_singh 8y ago

r_singh 8y ago
This post shows a helpful cold email pitch structure for startups trying to reach out to investors without prior introductions. The author spent hours over a period of time honing this template before cold-email-pitching to the same investor for the second time. Would love to see more examples of cold email pitches that received responses from investors!
- ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
  It's all about "clicking" with the investor. I always say it's not what you say, it's how you say and also who you are. Investing should be science but unfortunately it's an art and VC's that try to use data for investments implode: https://www.axios.com/social-capital-collapse-0c3257ab-b599-4047-b5cc-5d465419b373.html https://www.axios.com/social-capital-collapse-0c3257ab-b599-...
olooney 8y ago
> Explaining what Mapistry does and the problem we solve to investors is not easy. Customers get it because they have the problem, but investors never have the problem we’re addressing, so this paragraph was a tough one. Explaining the problem is only half the battle. You also have to prove that a large number of potential customers actually have said problem and are willing to pay money for a solution, and you need more than an clear elevator story to do that - you need hard data.
blackrock 8y ago
It seems that getting that extra seed round, when you already have recurring revenue, should be the easy part. Since you already had spent all the time and money to do the initial product engineering. Your database is in place, your web servers are online, and you can handle a modicum of traffic. So, you have proven that a market exists for your product. Then the extra VC seed money, is just for the major marketing and sales push, and to pay for extra servers. And these days, everyone just hosts it on the AWS cloud, so virtual servers are just a click away. There's no need to actually hire an army of Linux system administrators to handle your network anymore. My question is: How difficult is it to get Angel or VC money, to build out your Powerpoint idea? This is just the initial idea, that you have sketched out on a paper, with maybe some big ideas on how it can fulfill a market need. This engineering effort will take some time to flesh out, and it will take money to hire a small staff of engineers, and to just pay yourself to work on it.
- bradhe 8y ago
  > How difficult is it to get Angel or VC money, to build out your Powerpoint idea? Extremely. Read the tweet at the bottom of the post.
- dhnsmakala 8y ago
  Everyone and their pet dog has a PowerPoint idea...the late 90s are over.
- r_singh 8y ago
  The bar for milestones to raise money has increased a lot over the last two decades. What was 1M users is now 10M+ users. It's also worth noting that a lot of tools make growth at a faster rate possible as compared to before. The increased difficulty of raising seed during idea stage is apparent when you observe the increase in YC companies that have already launched with an MVP and are increasing traction working up to the demo day.

28 points by r_singh 8y ago

This post shows a helpful cold email pitch structure for startups trying to reach out to investors without prior introductions. The author spent hours over a period of time honing this template before cold-email-pitching to the same investor for the second time. Would love to see more examples of cold email pitches that received responses from investors!

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
It's all about "clicking" with the investor. I always say it's not what you say, it's how you say and also who you are. Investing should be science but unfortunately it's an art and VC's that try to use data for investments implode: https://www.axios.com/social-capital-collapse-0c3257ab-b599-4047-b5cc-5d465419b373.html https://www.axios.com/social-capital-collapse-0c3257ab-b599-...

olooney 8y ago

> Explaining what Mapistry does and the problem we solve to investors is not easy. Customers get it because they have the problem, but investors never have the problem we’re addressing, so this paragraph was a tough one. Explaining the problem is only half the battle. You also have to prove that a large number of potential customers actually have said problem and are willing to pay money for a solution, and you need more than an clear elevator story to do that - you need hard data.

blackrock 8y ago

It seems that getting that extra seed round, when you already have recurring revenue, should be the easy part. Since you already had spent all the time and money to do the initial product engineering. Your database is in place, your web servers are online, and you can handle a modicum of traffic. So, you have proven that a market exists for your product. Then the extra VC seed money, is just for the major marketing and sales push, and to pay for extra servers. And these days, everyone just hosts it on the AWS cloud, so virtual servers are just a click away. There's no need to actually hire an army of Linux system administrators to handle your network anymore. My question is: How difficult is it to get Angel or VC money, to build out your Powerpoint idea? This is just the initial idea, that you have sketched out on a paper, with maybe some big ideas on how it can fulfill a market need. This engineering effort will take some time to flesh out, and it will take money to hire a small staff of engineers, and to just pay yourself to work on it.

bradhe 8y ago
> How difficult is it to get Angel or VC money, to build out your Powerpoint idea? Extremely. Read the tweet at the bottom of the post.
dhnsmakala 8y ago
Everyone and their pet dog has a PowerPoint idea...the late 90s are over.
r_singh 8y ago
The bar for milestones to raise money has increased a lot over the last two decades. What was 1M users is now 10M+ users. It's also worth noting that a lot of tools make growth at a faster rate possible as compared to before. The increased difficulty of raising seed during idea stage is apparent when you observe the increase in YC companies that have already launched with an MVP and are increasing traction working up to the demo day.