128 days to go: balancing fundraising with product and everything in between

A recap of week fifteen as a full-time Founder.

Jade Buffong-Phillips

Jan 23, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you may want to skip ahead to…

Win🏅: Made it to the 2nd stage of an Angel Syndicate screening process
Loss 🤕: I had a painful call with a VC/fund
Lessons 💡: Position yourself as a start-up that’s a no-brainer to invest in
Resources 📚: Tips for building your brand community

As always, I appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave comments or reply to this email with your thoughts.

🎯 Q1 Objective

Complete 30 calls and get 2x more commitments

Last week was packed full of unexpected (but positive) progress. While I was powering through more investor calls, I also gathered some great advice and made huge leaps forward with the product (head to the wins section to find out more). Given there are only so many hours in a day, I struggle to prioritise what I had planned to do, which was:

Completing the Mane Hook-Up community set-up
Make another set of amends to our pitch deck after getting some feedback
Prepare for the 3x investor calls lined up and follow up with those I spoke to last week

What I ended up doing…

All of the above
Preparing for the next stage of product development
Filming more content with the team (and taking a bit of a road trip)

Of everything I learned last week, just taking opportunities as they come was the big one. Everything can’t be planned — and apparently, my to-do list can’t shrink 🤣 — so sometimes you just have to say goodbye to the original plan and embrace the unexpected.

🔋 Progress recap & highlights

Biggest wins

WIN 1️⃣: We made it to the 2nd stage of an Angel Syndicate screening process 🥳

Toward the end of last year, I submitted 30 or so applications to Angel syndicates across the world. Mainly as I wanted to make sure some of these conversations were kick-started in January.

And it’s started to pay off as:

a) syndicates are replying now and,
b) one of them has moved us along to the next stage in their application process 🎉

This means answering more questions about the team, our product and the raise in detail. I’m really excited to get to the next stage in the process, but the application is lengthy so I’m dedicating more time to completing the form this week.

I’ve said this before, but it does pay to sometimes go against the grain and complete tasks like this in low season. Given so many Founders have kick-started their fundraising efforts in January, completing a Syndicate application now likely means, longer decision-making time frames and more companies that you compete with.

TIPS FOR SYNDICATE APPLICATIONS: Try and find one or two Angels who are in a Syndicate and build a relationship with them. In time, they might refer you to which should help to accelerate the process.

WIN 2️⃣: The next iteration of Mane Hook-Up is being scoped out 👩🏾‍💻

One of my goals for this year is to balance fundraising with product growth and development.

It’s very easy to get swept up in fundraising and leave all things related to the product aside, but that’s also counterproductive when investors want to see some kind of monthly growth or progress along the way.

After collecting a tonne of customer research last year (that’s still ongoing), I’m going to use the rest of Q1 to double down on building a new version of Mane Hook-Up. This will put us in a position to share a beta platform with investors and — most importantly — shift to monetization sooner than expected.

I’ll share more as we get a bit closer to the release date!

TIP FOR BALANCING FUNDRAISING WITH BAU: Block out a chunk of time each week to review your product stats and make an action plan for tackling your growth. Demonstrating incrimental gains as your raising will help generate more interest from investors.

WIN 3️⃣: Kick-starting the recruitment for our Head of Product & Engineering 🔎

With the above in mind, I’m also starting to look for my right-hand man or woman to take the lead with all things related to the product.

While I was very fortunate to have a mentor who helped me to prep job specs, recruitment processes and everything else in between months ago (thanks, Jeremy!), I held off on recruiting anyone straight away as I wanted to close the round before jumping head-first into hiring. Mainly as I was worried that:

Even if someone said yes, they could pull out before we close the round and I’d have to repeat the recruitment process (a pain that I don’t wish on anyone) 😭.
Having tried to recruit a CTO before — and failing — I was worried that history would repeat itself 😓.

Even though those things still bother me, I’ve decided to start looking anyway. And, this decision was made after a few conversations with other founders and investors who advised me that:

Some investors (especially funds), wouldn’t even consider a product without a technical lead: this is a harsh but very true reality that I have to bear in mind. If my objective is to close the round in 240 days, I have to make Mane Hook-Up as appealing to investors as possible, and there’s no denying that a technical lead will do that.
Shedding light on recruitment is better than not having a technical lead: One investor advised me to add the profiles of the candidates I’m interviewing to our pitch deck to make it clear that recruitment is a work in progress. That insight into who ‘might’ be our technical lead, is more appealing than not having one.

That said and done, our job post is live, and I’m speaking to as many technical people as I can to get some advice about what to look out for. I aim to have some final-stage interviews in place by the middle of February, wish me luck!

TIP FOR RECRUITING TECHNICAL TALENT AS A 'NON' TECHNICAL FOUNDER: Get support from the people in your network. Ask developers you used to work with, old CTOs and technical leads to join you on interviews and help you prepare tasks. Speak to technical recruitment managers about the questions you should ask, and bring a technical person with you into the interviews as well. Cover as many bases as possible to make sure you're making a well-informed, and well-vetted, decision.

WIN 4️⃣: Received a very positive response to a cold email 💛

Cold emails have played a huge part in me reaching as many of the right investors as I possibly can.

Most of the time, I get a quick email saying if they are/aren’t interested in having a call, but very rarely do I receive feedback.

Fortunately, I got some last week…

Hi Jade, I hope your day is going well. I wanted to reply to say thank you for your email. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to invest, but I at least wanted to tell you that our email was very good and that your deck is very good as well. It is rare that I will take the time to review a cold email and actually sit on it for a day or two and then take a look at the pitch.
Finally, you should be commended for what you have accomplished to date. Your site looks clean and professional and seems to position you well with your ICP. Very well done.

This one email made my week. It’s number 2 on the list of best things to happen in January (second to getting a yes from Haley).

Why?

Because this tells me that our outreach is resonating with people. It tells me that well-written cold emails and a solid deck can get some attention. And, it also tells me that people understand the problem we’re trying to solve.

I know many investors hesitate to share feedback with Founders (both good and bad) but I do believe this robs so many people of the opportunity to learn what is and isn’t working. Some of the best decisions I’ve made to date have been off the back of feedback sessions with people who are more experienced and versed than I am in the world of fundraising.

While I don’t think we can change the feedback problem overnight, it is worth thinking about what everyone (founders and investors alike) can do to change the way this works right now.

TIP FOR COLD EMAILS: Keep them short, sweet and share the stats/facts that are hard hitting. Attach or add a link to your deck and (if you feel confident) a link to your calendar as well.

WIN 5️⃣: Automations update 🤖 and the latest outreach pivot ↩️

This is week two of my automations for Angel investors in America, Canada and Africa to be up and running. I’ve split the automations by location to see if the performance varies depending on where the investors are. Plus, I’ve kept track of the overall performance. Here’s how the automations are looking right now:

Performance by location:

Best: Africa — 53% open rate, 8% click-through-rate, 1% reply rate
Average: Canada — 29% open rate, 2% click-through-rate, 1% reply rate
Worst: South America — 20% open rate, 2% click-through rate, 0% reply rate

Overall performance:

💃🏾 no new people added to the automations
📧 799 people have opened my emails (27% of the total - up 9% WoW)
🖱️ 85 clicks on our pitch deck (10% of those who opened - up 15% WoW)
↩️ 12 people have replied so far (1% of opens - up 200% WoW)
📞 1x call booked (= to last week)

This data paints a very interesting picture and has helped me to make a few decisions about what to do next with outreach. We will be:

Gathering the details of more investors in Africa, Canada and America.
Adding a link to my calendar in the emails to see if that improved the CVR to booking a call.
Launching LinkedIn outreach to see how this compares to email.
Adding senior leaders in the afro hair product space to our outreach.

Overall, I’m very grateful that our outreach has taught me so much about what we should and shouldn’t be doing to connect with investors. A lot of people advise against cold outreach but, given how much I’ve learned along the way, I really do recommend Founders work some cold outreach into their investor strategy.

TIP FOR AUTOMATIONS: Segmenting your automations by investor type (e.g. Angels, VCs, Family Offices) and even location (e.g. country), will give you plenty of insight into who you should spend more time speaking to. If you're using a CRM, you'll be able to track data like open,CTR and replies. The more data you have, the easier it'll be to adapt.

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Biggest L’s 🤕

LOSS 😩: I had a painful call with a VC/fund (who tore a lot of my work up)

This gif is a perfect reflection of how I felt after a call with a fund last week.

Knocked to the floor and winded 😭

Now, I’m a big believer in tough love. It helps people cut through a lot of fluff and make better decisions about how they work, quickly. But, I also believe in doing this from a place of kindness, and not as a means of making people feel small.

Unfortunately, I was on the receiving end of the latter last week, and it was mighty painful. We had a short 20-minute call booked to discuss Mane Hook-Up and what I’ve been doing to date. It started pretty mildly and descended into, multiple sucker punches (combined with facial expressions that pretty much said, you’re wasting your time here).

In all of this, they did raise some valid points that I’ll go away and prepare answers for (because I’m sure someone else will bring similar questions up at some point), but the interaction made me realise:

Why so many Founders get disheartened and stop fundraising altogether,
There are a lot of biases towards Founders who don’t go full-time quickly (which brings up a host of problems for people who don’t have the financial capacity to do so, but that could be a post of its own),
There are a handful of investors who are unkind and, unfortunately, damage the reputation of the masses.

Feedback and no’s don’t have to be mean, painful or disheartening for anyone. They can be learning curves, opportunities to share feedback and turning points that serve both parties.

For Founders who are ever caught in these conversations, remember that how you handle yourself is far more important than proving a point. Exiting the conversation with grace and peace of mind is always better than having a showdown.

A few other losses this week:

1x syndicate has paused their investment and our application won’t be considered for now
We received 2x no’s (from a fund and a syndicate)

TIP FOR FOUNDERS THAT HAVE EXPERIENCED PAINFUL INVESTOR CALLS OR MEETINGS: Give yourself the time and space to feel upset about what happened, but don't paint every investor with the same brush. Try to go into each call you have with a clean slate and judge the quality of each individual conversation that you have.

💡 Lessons learned

Quote of the week
Changing isn’t dismantling the old, it’s building the new.
— Brianna Wiest

LESSON 👩🏾‍🏫: Position yourself as a start-up that’s a no-brainer to invest in

It’s fair to say that the expectations of start-ups that are raising have shifted.

Gone are the days of just having a concept.

When I started raising, I quickly realised that we’re now living in the age of traction, team and experienced founders. But, I was unsure of how many boxes investors would expect me to tick.

I started with the simple things like proving the size of the Black hairdressing industry (because people wildly underestimate this, but that could also be a post of its own). Then it was expanding my team of Advisors to demonstrate how much industry knowledge we had. But, as I started to chip away at all of the areas we could improve, I soon realised, there is always something that could be better. It felt never-ending and I kept wondering when what we had achieved would be “enough”.

The more conversations I have with Founder, ex-startup Operators and investors, the more I realise that it’s my job to make an investor feel like it’s a no-brainer to support us. And that means chipping away at that list is going to be a constant work in progress.

If investors need to see traction and team, I need to make those two areas of the business so compelling, so they see the value in what I’m building very quickly.

Right now that means:

Finding a technical lead: because we are building a tech product, and most investors will need to know there is someone on the inside to direct the business.
Demonstrating traction in various ways: e.g. waitlist subscriptions, community members and product usage.

It’s this careful balance between providing investors with what they need to see, but in a way that isn’t forced, that can make fundraising feel painful or jarring. But, the people who win are the ones who focus on making every aspect of their start-up so compelling that investors struggle to say no.

Not an easy place to get to, but it is what every fundraising Founder should aspire to.

💥 Hack of the week

Nothing new to add this week! Feel free to revisit some of the hacks from my previous newsletters:

📚 Resources

If you made it all the way to the end of this newsletter, you deserve a reward. So here’s a list of the best resources I came across last week to help you with your raise.

Building a community for your business

🧰 Founder’s toolbox

Anyone who knows me knows that I love finding tools, apps and systems to add to my arsenal. Here’s a list of the best tools that I found last week.

Freeflarum

What’s it for: Anyone who wants to create a simple community forum without having to build it from scratch.
How it helped: I haven’t used Freeflarum in a couple of years, but it’s a great forum tool that you can integrate for free. It’s very comprehensive but also easy to use. I recommend this if you’re trying to build a community into your existing platform and aren’t too sure where to start.
Price: Free!

Brgd

What’s it for: Getting introductions to people you’re interested in speaking to via mutual connections.
How it helped: This is super useful for getting introductions to other founders and investors who are outside of your immediate network. In a few clicks, you can scroll through someone’s contacts, request an introduction and be connected to people. Highly recommend it to anyone who’s fundraising or looking for key hires (e.g. technical leads).
Price: Starting from $19/month

Questions? 🤔

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,

J x

P.S. Here are some of my other posts:

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240 Days to Raise