65 days to go: first event done with 68% turn-out & some revenue

A recap of week twenty three as a full-time Founder.

Jade Buffong-Phillips

Mar 26, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

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

Win🏅: Successfully co-hosted our first event and had 68% turnout
Loss🤕: 2x no-shows for investor calls
Lesson💡: There’s no direct correlation between input and output when it comes to fundraising
Resources 📚 : $100k virtual pitch competition with Canva x Forum Ventures

🎯 Objective

Run, recap and analyse our first event

I was not short of things to do last week 😅 — from the last-minute prep, collecting goody bags, food and chairs — it felt like there was much to do and not enough time ahead of the event on Wednesday. My core objectives were:

Finalise the event prep, run the evening and analyse the results to see what went well (or what didn’t).
Get final investor calls booked in given Easter is around the corner, and
Handover any core marketing or product decision to the team so I could focus on being present at the event.

That said, it was another week of less focus on raising while I channelled energy into operations and growth. While it has been a manic couple of weeks, now that I have my time back (and things will slow down a bit), I have the headspace to reflect on what we’ve learned and gained from running an event.

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: Pitched to the Morning Mentors at Alloy Growth Lab and received some valuable feedback 🎉

Getting feedback from investors is usually tricky — mainly as there’s a lot of concern about pushback and generating bad blood with Founders (which I get).

So, when I was introduced to the Alloy Growth Lab, and offered an opportunity to take part in their Morning Mentor’s sessions, I snapped up the opportunity in a minute. These sessions are super valuable as Founders get to virtually run through their pitch (in 15 minutes) with a group of 15+ investors, followed by 45 minutes of questions and feedback before they send you detailed notes via email.

I loved the idea of this for several reasons:

The numbers 🔢: While it’s unlikely I’ll ever speak to that many investors on one call, I knew that if I could get through this call in one piece, I have no reason to feel nervous about any other call!
The variety 😁: Different types of investors will ask different questions and focus on areas they’re familiar with. Again, being exposed to so many different people allowed me to gain more experience and figure out how to respond to cover as many bases as possible.
The time⏱️: About 4x months ago I made a mess of a pitch competition that had to be delivered in a time limit. This session allowed me to do this again and test what I’ve learned since!

And the session didn’t disappoint! There were 20 mentors on the call, all of them were super engaged and asked a tonne of questions once I’d finished my pitch. Even when the tough questions came my way, I felt really comfortable with answering and receiving feedback.

I was rated on a scale of 1-5 for the business concept, target market, presentation skills, management team and funding potential. Overall I got:

The strongest category was presentation skills (3.97 / 5)
Average of 3.51 / 5 per category
Total of 87.67 / 125
My mark was 22.12% above the running average

I was also very fortunate to receive some feedback about my deck (that I’ll now start making tweaks to) as well as gaining an insight into the concerns that investors may have and how to address them upfront. Overall, the experience has not only been of great value to developing my skills as a Founder, but I also feel better equipped for my next set of pitch meetings because of it.

If any Founders are interested in taking part in a Morning Mentors session, feel free to give Jeremy a nudge. You won’t regret it!

TIPS FOR TIMED PITCHES: do run throughs of your pitch and try to get it down to 1-2 minutes less than the allotted time. That way, you have a bit of time in the bank in case you make any mistakes, go slightly off script or fumble.

WIN 2️⃣: Successfully co-hosted our first event and had a 68% turnout 🔥

Last week, about 90% of my time and effort was spent preparing for our first event — and it was well worth it. You can see from the video below what we got up to on the night ✨.

manehookup

A post shared by @manehookup

We very quickly went from thinking about the event in December to setting a date and planning everything out when we returned in the New Year. We wanted to test the appetite for certain events, what people would be prepared to pay and whether they could significantly impact our growth.

We’ve gained a better understanding of all the above and learned a lot from this experience. Even though this isn’t fundraising-related, thought it would be worth sharing with you all.

Consider the CVR of the event registration page (ours was 6%)

While I spent a lot of time considering how we would drive traffic to the event landing page (hosted in Luma), I hadn’t reverse-engineered the process to pinpoint exactly how many people needed to see the page for us to sell every ticket.

The average website conversion rate (CVR) is between 2%-8%. So, if we had assumed our CVR would be around 4%, we needed around 750 people to see our page to sell out.

Fortunately, our actual CVR was a bit higher (ended up being 6%) and we were just shy of 400 people seeing the page in 7 days. Given we only had a week to market the event (as we found our event space a lot later than expected), this is a pretty good result.

We also learned (from the chart above) that Instagram contributed to 18% of the event page traffic. That says a lot given we only posted twice in our feed and four times in our stories during the week.

I now know that Luma also supports UTM tracking, so we could have seen the CVR from every channel/post that was shared had we gone into that much detail. For example, I wish we had tracked the links shared via WhatsApp group chats to see which ones contributed to more ticket sales. But that’s a learning for next time!

Trial a range of ticket prices

One of the big questions we tried to answer is, how much is our community willing to spend on tickets? We walked into this having no idea and wanted to try a couple of prices and strategies to sell.

We started with a time-limited (48-hour) discounted ticket price of £5. We managed to sell 8x of these in just over two days however we made a couple of mistakes:

Ticket names: The first batch of tickets were called ‘Stylist tickets’ as we predominantly targeted textured hair stylists. However, we had made the event open to hair enthusiasts as well. By naming the tickets after the stylists we may have put people off during the first day (I jumped into Luma to tweak the name to discounted tickets on day two).
Having more ticket options: In hindsight, I would have shown the full-price ticket option while the discounted tickets were on sale so people could calculate exactly how much they would save. This may have incentivised more people to grab a discounted ticket quickly.

When the full-price tickets were released, we sold more and even had a couple of tickets come through on the day of the event. This gives me the impression that the price point was high enough for people to see the value in attending, but not so high that they were turned off. Win, win.

Figure out what your max capacity is in your space

We originally thought our venue could hold 40 people seated… but when we arrived with all of the chairs and equipment, turns out that 30 was the perfect fit. That said, we sold 22 tickets in a week, which means we probably could have achieved our 30-person max capacity had we given ourselves a bit more time to do the marketing.

Collect feedback from your guests

Finally, we collected feedback about an hour after the event had finished. Seven people replied and gave us a rating (6x 5 star / 1x four star) which indicates the topic, guests and environment delivered.

I hadn’t planned on sending a feedback form out immediately after the event until I realised this could also be done via our events platform. But without it, I’d be unable to see what we could improve on for next time.

With all of this in mind, one of the most valuable things that I gained from this experience is having an operational process to follow for events as well as an amazing space that we can return to again and again.

That’s a win-win.

TIP FOR EVENT DAYS: Give yourself more time than you need for everything (set-up, collecting food/drinks etc), that way you'll be more relaxed on the night. It's unlikely that everything will be perfect, so expect 2-3 small things to go wrong and, if that doesn't happen, know that its been a good night.

WIN 3️⃣: Automations update 🤖

My cold outreach automations have finally come to an end. As promised last week, I’ve analysed all of them (by territory) to give you an idea of what’s happened since they launched 7x weeks ago.

Here are some of the variables that I kept the same across all automations:

Set up for all the automations

📧 email cadence 7-9 days apart
✍🏽 2x subject lines tested

This was mainly to make sure I could fairly judge how they performed. For those of you who are unsure about email cadence, I recommend between 7-10 days as that’s often enough to remind people that you exist, but not so often that it feels like you’re spamming their inbox.

And here’s how each of the automations performed, in order of best to worst:

African investor automation (best performing)

💃🏾 228 people added to automations
📧 145 people have opened my emails (63% open rate)
🖱️ 31 clicks on our pitch deck (13% CTR)
↩️ 10 people have replied so far (3% of people)

Canadian investor automation

💃🏾 773 people added to automations
📧 268 people have opened my emails (34% open rate)
🖱️ 80 clicks on our pitch deck (10% CTR)
↩️ 27 people have replied so far (3% of people)

USA investor automation

💃🏾 1341 people added to automations
📧 401 people have opened my emails (29% open rate)
🖱️ 93 clicks on our pitch deck (6% CTR)
↩️ 19 people have replied so far (1% of people)

South American investor automation (worst performing)

💃🏾 657 people added to automations
📧 180 people have opened my emails (27% open rate)
🖱️ 52 clicks on our pitch deck (7% CTR)
↩️ 6 people have replied so far (1% of people)

It was no surprise that the investors based in Africa had the highest open, CTR and reply rate, given they are likely to understand the product and market. However, I was surprised that the South American automation had the poorest performance — I expected more replies considering the open rate was still relatively strong.

I hadn’t considered tracking the number of calls that have been booked per automation (I’ll try to weave that into next week’s newsletter!).

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Biggest L’s 🤕

LOSS 😩: 2x no-shows for investor calls

It can be challenging to get calls booked with investors — between outreach, seeking warm intros and attending events, it takes a lot of time and energy… which can make it more painful when they don’t show up for calls 😭. Last week, two of the investors in my calendar didn’t turn up and needless to say, it stressed me.

Now, granted, life happens and calls will be missed. So, I considered that and emailed both investors to see whether they wanted to reschedule for another day. One got back to me with an apology — as life had indeed happened — and they offered to speak next week. The other didn’t reply to me at all.

In the heat of the moment, I felt deflated and, again, questioned what I was doing (e.g. can I do this? Are investors really interested?) but it’s important that, in moments like this, we as Founders don’t automatically assume we’ve done something wrong as some calls will just fall through the cracks.

TIP FOR DEALING WITH NO-SHOWS: dwelling on a no-show can distract you from the task at hand: getting calls with and speaking to more investors. So, try to avoid focussing on it for too long. Protecting your peace is far more important than holding onto a minor loss.

💡 Lessons learned

Quote of the week
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
— Henry David Thoreau

LESSON 👩🏾‍🏫: There’s no direct correlation between input and output when it comes to fundraising

One of the values that we get taught very early on in life is, that the harder you work (or the more effort that you make), the more you’ll get in return.

This kind of works while you’re at school, if you take up a sport and, to some extent, in the world of work. However, I don’t believe this thinking should be applied to fundraising (and probably a bunch of other things too).

Mainly because there are so many things beyond our control.

I, for example, did a lot of heavy lifting at the beginning of the fundraise — whether this was gathering information about investors, building automations, prepping my deck or seeking warm intros. While it was all well worth doing, the input at the time didn’t immediately translate to closing deals with investors. But, it allowed me to lay the groundwork and foundations for more conversations in the future.

However, as I have less heavy lifting to do now, I’ve been able to book more calls as well as gather more feedback and support. Something a Founder said to me a few weeks ago (that sings true) is you can also have a full pipeline of investors and all of those potential leads can either fall through or end up ghosting you. You can have moments where you have barely anyone to speak to and one lead translates to a deal.

As frustrating as it can feel for Founders, this process isn’t linear or as simple as input = output. There have been moments along the way where I’ve felt exhausted and wanted to just pause, questioning whether I’m doing all the right things because (as I mentioned) input didn’t feel equal to what I was getting on the other side. But, I’ve since learned to accept that this isn’t one of those processes.

Plenty of companies have great founders, products and teams, who struggle to raise cash. What it comes down to is how patient are you and how quickly can you adapt to the market you’re observing and the investor expectations that exist at the time.

As Founders, the sooner we realise that the effort we make will fluctuate (as will the results) the more likely we are to keep powering through, even when it feels like things aren’t happening at the pace we would like.

💥 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.

Fundraising

Investing $100k in B2B women-led start-ups: Forum Ventures and Canva have collaborated for a virtual pitch day at the end of the month in the hopes of finding women-led start-ups to invest in. Sign up before the 10th of April to be put forward for a spot.

General advice

The most innovative companies in the world: Check out the top 24 innovative companies there are and where they’re typically located.

🧰 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.

Cleanfeed: record high-definition audio

What’s it for: Recording high-quality audio (e.g. for videos or podcasts).
How it helped: Run audio sessions by inviting guests to your Cleanfeed account and have everything recorded in one place.
Price: Free for basic features and $34 a month for Business.

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