5 investor outreach mistakes that kill a funding round

The quality of a founder’s investor outreach can make the difference between closing and not closing a funding round. Here are the 5 biggest things we’ve seen tank replies:

1) Bad email deliverability

Testing your deliverability on a site like Mail Tester is step zero to outreach. Spam filters are getting stricter every day, and investors’ spam filters can be even more sensitive.

As much of a pain as it can be to warm up an email or to edit an email’s settings to be more deliverable, it could make (literally) a multi-million dollar difference.

And follow best practices. Not too much punctuation or all caps in the subject line, avoid trigger words, and don’t send attachments in the initial email.

2) Low volume

While the quality of your outreach is important, you can’t completely sacrifice quantity. Reaching out to 3 investors per day is a good way to get absolutely nowhere.

A general rule: do everything you can to reach out to 100 investors per day. At this volume, luck becomes a much smaller factor in the equation.

And if you wanted to go a step beyond, you could look into using an outreach tool like Raisi that sends hundreds of cold emails per day.

3) Too much text in the email

Investors just need to know you’re legit and that the opportunity your company presents is big. Tell them who you are, exactly what the business does, and the most impressive things about it.

Don’t use big empty statements like “everyone loves this idea”, “there’s nothing like this in the market”, “this is going to change the world”, etc.

Most outreach they get is from idea-stage founders with no real plan to launch or make money. You need to make it clear you’re not that.

4) Zero confidence

Remember, YOU are THEIR opportunity. Investors want to invest in companies who don’t need their investment.

Desperation is the quickest way to get rejected or get a bogus term sheet. Just state the facts of the business in a clear and confident way.

5) Wrong deck

Often if an investor replies and asks for the deck, founders’ instinct is to send the full leave-behind deck with ALL of the information.

We always recommend sending the teaser deck instead, and saving the full leave-behind deck for after you’ve had a call.

The teaser deck is the 5-6 slide deck that just covers the basics like product, traction, and team.

Because it’s much shorter, investors are way more likely to give it a real read.

And of course, make sure you’re in a good spot to raise. If you can’t write a fact-based email about your business and feel at least somewhat confident about it, it may be wise to hold off on fundraising and focus on pumping up the traction numbers.

Good luck with everything and watch out for next week’s email!

Best,

Nathan