72 days to go: event planning and getting help from my people
72 days to go: event planning and getting help from my people
A recap of week twenty three as a full-time Founder.
Hey there 👋🏾,
For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you can skip ahead to…
Win🏅: Monthly investor update email led to 3x opportunities
Loss🤕: None this week!
Lesson💡: What we learned from planning and marketing our first event
Resources 📚 : List of 2k global investors with email addresses
🎯 Objective
Event planning and getting help from my nearest and dearest
This week, I’m co-hosting the first Mane Hook-Up event for stylists and customers (wish me luck!), which means a lot of time and energy has been channelled into the final bits of prep.
That doesn’t mean investor outreach has come to a standstill — automations are still running in the background and calls are still being booked. At the beginning of the year, I promised to find a better balance between building Mane Hook-Up and powering through investor outreach, and last week was the first time that everything felt pretty evenly split.
Even better, I fell back into the habit of being productive (not just busy), long may that continue!
As always, I appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave comments or reply to this email with your thoughts.
🔋 Progress recap & highlights
Biggest wins
WIN 1️⃣: 1x good investor call, 1x call booked from cold outreach and 2x people added to investor updates email list 🎉
I’ve found that having great calls with investors stems from one thing: they’re aligned and care about what we’re building.
Whether that means they have previously invested in beauty/marketplaces OR they’re personally involved in the afro/curly hair market, that alignment means the call is productive from the get-go. I sent a cold email a few months ago and, fortunately, got the attention of a small VC that specialises in supporting beauty technology start-ups. While it took a while for the stars to align for a call (several emails, text messages and weeks later), when we finally had an opportunity to speak, it was time very much well spent.
Conversations like these are often energising, and give me a chance to talk more about the mission and vision. Better yet, this VC was just as interested in me (e.g. understanding if I did or didn’t have the support I needed) as they were in the business, which was pretty refreshing. It’s rare to hear investors ask how you’re doing, managing things financially etc, so that also gives me the impression they could be a great fit beyond the product alignment.
On another note, I also had a call booked from an automation that recently ended (more on this in the automations update), and two people also responded to say that they aren’t investing right now but they’re happy to be added to our investors update email list.
This shows that my cold outreach not only continues to bring in a steady stream of calls (typically 1-2 a week), but it’s also allowed me to start building relationships with investors whom I, otherwise, wouldn’t know.
TIPS FOR ASKING INVESTORS QUESTIONS: Investing is a two way street, Founders should be keen to ask questions and vet their investors. Remember that it's important to gain value beyond money, so ask questions like; 'how do you support your portfolio founders?' and 'why are you interested in this market?'. WIN 2️⃣: Monthly investor update email led to a speaking opportunity 🗣️, invite to a virtual pitch 🎫 + a potential commitment 🔥
I’ve committed to sending an investor update email in the second week of each month to make sure I maintain a steady relationship with all of the investors I’ve interacted with so far. Plus, I keep track of all the emails in a folder so I can review everything that’s happened at the end of the year (an idea I got from this LinkedIn post by Siddhi Mittal).
Last week, I almost failed to send our monthly update 😅. This was my own doing as I had struggled to prioritise (especially with the event planning starting to take up more of my time). Fortunately, I buckled down and got the email out on Tuesday afternoon.
While it felt like a bit of a distraction at the time, it was well worth the 45 minutes of writing and editing, as this email led to…
Speaking opportunity: An Angel investor who leads a large community for women of colour in the UK (one of our primary target audiences) invited me to speak at an event at the end of March.
Potential commitment: An investor/Founder shed some light on how busy things had been and said they would circle back to potentially invest once the dust had settled.
Pitch invite: An accelerator leader sent us an invite to a virtual pitch night that will take place in a few weeks with a VC they’re connected to.
None of this would have been possible without being consistent in making time to send a monthly update.
I’ve often made the mistake of assuming that getting a no reply means either no one has read the email or no one is interested. This is far from the truth, investors will read, take note and reply to your updates when they’re able to add value or they’re interested in supporting you.
It’s also important to remember that the majority of Founders don’t send an investor update email (literally 3 out of 10 do), so this is an opportunity for me to stand out and earn the respect/trust of potential investors.
TIP FOR INVESTOR UPDATE EMAILS: start your email with the 'asks' for the month. Investors may not read the entire update, so if you have your most pressing requests at the top, you may get 1-2 more replies than usual. WIN 3️⃣: We started promoting our event and sold 30% of tickets in a few days 🎟️
We’re co-hosting our very first event this week with Shedid & Parrish 🥳 to talk about the impact of products and technology on the afro/curly hair industry.
We’ve learned a tonne from planning our first event (more on this in lessons). But even with all of the stress, I’m really happy with:
The quality of the speakers and the topic; the conversation on the night will be fire 🔥.
The venue; as we found an afro/curly hair salon to use as the event space, this really speaks to our audience and our brand and is a meaningful space to have this discussion 🪮.
Ticket pricing; we tested the cost of tickets to see what people are/aren’t willing to pay for. This is the first time we’ve generated revenue 🤩 and it will influence how we run events in the future.
The guest list; the people who have booked tickets are truly into the hair community and I’m positive they’ll add a great deal to the conversation.
That said, given the event set-up took so long, we haven’t had as much time for promoting as I would have liked. On one hand, we sold around 30% of our tickets in a few days — which I am very grateful for — but I now know that we may have been able to sell out, had we had an extra 2-3 weeks to make some noise about it.
Either way, I’m really excited to run our first event and hope that everyone who turns up has a great time tomorrow!
WIN 4️⃣: I asked for help and got it 🆘
In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned feeling very busy (but not productive) as I had been buried in admin and event planning 😅.
So, I started to tackle this by asking my friends and family for some help. As silly as it sounds, I typically spend a tonne of time trying to figure something out for myself before I ask anyone else to step in.
But that approach was sucking up way too much time, especially with important/non-urgent tasks or things that I just don’t specialise in. After experiencing the consequence of time running away from me, I took action and decided to:
Hand inbox management over to a close friend: emails are a silent but deadly time drainer. They come at all hours of the day, take a lot of time to address and pull me away from things that need my time and attention. It’s a necessary, but distracting, task that I don’t need to focus on so much and, fortunately, this weight has been lifted off my shoulders and handed over to a friend.
Ask for help with finding an event caterer 🥙: with so many moving parts to the event, I needed to focus on the promotion, and finalising the topics we’re going to discuss on the day. I needed help with sourcing a Caribbean caterer who could take on an order quickly. So, I asked my sister and she was able to connect me with someone through her church. Saved me a tonne of time and allowed me to regain focus on the rest of the planning.
Ask for help with set-up and getting chairs: who knew renting chairs for an event was such a fuss?! 🫣 After searching high and low for a supplier that could offer the chairs at a reasonable price, I also decided to turn to a friend who asked her church and fortunately, they were more than happy to offer us some for the night.
I share all of this to shed light on the fact that you don’t have to do every little task alone. While I’m responsible for signing off the food and the budget for the chairs, I didn’t have to source everything. Breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks, before delegating things to people that you can trust is a game-changer.
TIP FOR GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH DELEGATING: often we just have to find someone we trust to hand a task over to. If you're leading an early stage start-up, asking family and friends for help (that you know are reliable) will give you the much needed time to focus on the things that really matter. WIN 5️⃣: Automations update 🤖
My cold outreach automations have started to come to an end. The South American, African and Canadian series have finished, leaving the USA automation live.
I’ll do a complete overview of the automations next week (with a breakdown per region), but in the meantime, here’s what has happened so far:
💃🏾 0 people added to automations
📧 1,007 people have opened my emails (35% of the total - up 1% WoW)
🖱️ 244 clicks on our pitch deck (24% of those who opened - up 4% WoW)
↩️ 63 people have replied so far (6% of opens - up 5% WoW)
I was also very fortunate to come across a free list of 2k investors on LinkedIn (link in Resources) which I’ll be using to launch a new set of automations this week. Given I’ve now run 16 different automations, using 20 different email templates and 9 subject lines, I now have enough data to create a series that combines the best of everything.
It’s important to remember that while automations are running in the background, the content has an impact on the way that potential investors will view both myself as a Founder and the brand. So I’ll invest time in making sure they’re set up correctly and in a way that doesn’t make people feel like I’m bothering them five seconds.
Other positive things that happened last week:
Email deliverability is back up to 90%
Started ironing out the details of family/friend investment outreach
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Biggest L’s 🤕
None to report for last week! But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn anything…
💡 Lessons learned
Quote of the week
Understanding that failure isn’t the opposite of success is part of success.
— Ariana Huffington
LESSON 👩🏾🏫: What we learned from planning and marketing our first event
I met the Founder of the textured hair brand Shedid & Parrish towards the end of last year and we hit it off straight away. We very quickly decided that we wanted to host an event together and, potentially, do more as the year went on.
As we’ve powered through all of the tasks for our first event, I’ve realised that even an event of this size can’t take more time than expected - especially when you’re doing it for the first time.
Even as event novices, we did some of the sensible things off the bat:
We gave ourselves 3 months to plan: given both of us are Founders and either knee-deep in funding or product development and sales, we needed enough time to get everything set up for the event and felt 3 months was more than enough.
We decided to divide and conquer: we divided all of the core tasks between the two of us (e.g. venue, moderator, panellists and sponsors) to even the load.
We looked for an event sponsor to supply some goodies and offload some costs: events can be costly and we wanted to keep our overheads to £500 in total. That meant finding a few sponsors to support with the costs.
However, even with this structure and thinking, there were plenty of things that we hadn’t anticipated that took us by surprise. Such as…
Time to find a suitable venue: Given we operate in the hair/beauty space, we wanted to find an event space that wasn’t too stuffy and corporate but also didn’t cost the earth. It took about two months to find something that worked well and offered the vibe that both of us were looking for. Now that we’ve secured a great space in a very central location, it’s fair to say that we will come back to the same space again and again. But that doesn’t take away the fact that this was super time-consuming the first time around.
Taking on unexpected costs: Food and drinks had always been on our to-do list but chairs weren’t 😅. When we started to gather quotes, the cost of chairs ranged from £170-£200 — and this is for an event of less than 50 people. Not only did this throw our costs off, but we also realised that we hadn’t created a buffer in our budget to absorb unexpected costs like this.
Time to sign off a sponsorship: While we found our sponsor, Ruka Hair, easily enough, it took about 5-6 weeks to get the final sign-off from the team and confirm all of the details. This makes sense given all companies will have a process to follow internally, but again we just hadn’t considered how long it would take to finalise everything.
With all that said and done, we ended up securing our venue 10 days before the event was due, doing the final confirmation with our panellists 8 days before the event and marketing exactly 7 days before.
With an attendee target to hit and 7 days to do so, we all started to power through and share the event with our extended communities. But, even with over a decade of marketing under my belt, there was plenty for me to learn from this experience. Such as:
Have a range of ticket types 🎫: we opted for two ticket types — discounted (£5) and full-price (£7.99) — and gave people 48 hours to nab the cheaper tickets. This was a great tactic to reel people in, but in hindsight, we could have included a third tier and given a few tickets away for free. This would have given us a chance to compare bookings vs attendance for free vs. paid tickets, which would have made a great experiment.
Allow people to buy multiple tickets for friends and family 💳: it took me a couple of days to understand how to update our event page and allow potential attendees to buy multiple tickets. Given many people don’t like to attend events alone, this option can improve the CVR of people who land on the page.
Broadcast our message and notify people directly 📣: I shared the event with several communities (email newsletter, Instagram, WhatsApp groups etc) but none of these performed as well as messaging people directly. Whether it was people that I had spoken to a few weeks ago or months ago, there was far more interest when I reached out to someone personally than in a group.
Get all who are involved to align on the marketing plan: given both of us as hosts and our panellists are super busy, it took us a while to coordinate and decide on how we would spread the word about the event. I fired messages our across all of my major social channels (LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, newsletter), but that was done individually vs working as a team which would have been more powerful.
Start marketing even if you haven’t got the final guest line up or venue:
It’s fair to say, that planning this event has been quite the learning curve. I’ve had a chance to collaborate with some incredible people, learn a tonne about our audience and figure out some reasonable ways to generate revenue.
If there’s anyone who specialises in event planning (or you’ve been there done it and worn the t-shirt), please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
💥 Hack of the week
Nothing new to add this week! Feel free to revisit some of the hacks from my previous newsletters:
What to consider when paying someone to build an investor outreach list
How to find investors details on Crunchbase (without paying a penny)
📚 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.
Fundraising
List of 2k global investors with email addresses: Ruben D, shares a list of investors (includes email addresses and LinkedIn profiles) for founders to reach out to. The list can be filtered by fund type, stages of investment, location and more. You can create a copy of the CRM or download a CSV.
UnLtd grants and fund: a platform that helps social entrepreneurs by offering grants every quarter. They also have a growth impact fund where founders can seek from £50,000 to £1.5m.
General advice
Community-led growth advice: Jeanine Suah shares eight steps to building a sustainable community.
🧰 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.
Folk CRM: manage all of your professional and personal relationships
What’s it for: CRM that can be used for both customers and other processes (e.g. investor relationship management).
How it helped: I’ve only trialled Folk, but it is very simple and straightforward to use. You can also create multiple CRMs/views in one account, which is helpful if you’re managing several audiences (e.g. marketplaces with businesses and customers).
Price: Free for 200 contacts, and $18 a month for unlimited contacts.
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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