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Seed fundraising checklist for founders




Contents

🧘🏻‍♂️ Fundraising strategy & philosophy

☑️ High-level to-do list

🌱 Seed stage essentials

📣 Presentation materials

👨🏻‍💻 Data room

📑 Documents examples for investments

🙋‍♂️ Questions?


🧘🏻‍♂️ Fundraising strategy & philosophy

💡 Fundraising is like sales → you sell to investors → you need a big funnel to get conversions
💡 Great traction substitutes raising money skill
💡 Key driver for investors to invest is FOMO – fear of missing out

☑️ High-level to-do list

  • 🔲 Preparation: grow your network (outreach in LinkedIn, give talks, help others)

  • 🔲 Collect a list of investors (~200 people)

  • 🔲 Pitch materials preparation

  • 🔲 Create “Echo chamber”

  • 🔲Outreach & pitching campaign (1 month)

  • 🔲Due diligence (DD) with Data room

  • 🔲 Valuation price game

  • 🔲 Signature of documents & getting money to the bank account

🌱 Seed stage essentials

  • main round target is hypothesis testing:

    • is there many prospective clients?

    • COGS < X

    • CAC < Y

  • money usage: X sprints for Y money

  • investments strategy: many tickets of $5-50K for up to $500K in total (not one big ticket for $500K)

  • investors focus: target angels & micro-funds (<$100M under management)


📣 Presentation materials

💡 In all the materials storytelling is king 👑
💡 Pitch points essentials *(by Scott Kupor retold by Pavel Danilov)*:
👇 Market is incredibly big (so investor can make money) 💵💵💵 → particularly our team can win
🦸‍♂️→ here is our traction 📊 → here is our product vision 🔮

  • 🔲 Long deck/story

  • 🔲 Short deck

  • 🔲 Teaser/One-pager

  • 🔲 Blurb

  • 🔲 Data room docs

  • 🔲 Financials

    • 🔲 Bare minimum: financial model with Profit&Loss (PL), Cash-flow (CF), unit economics & how it gets better with growth, valuation

    • 🔲 Mature startup: financial model with Profit&Loss (PL), Cash-flow (CF), Balance sheet (BS), unit economics and valuation

  • 🔲 Slides to answer crucial & popular questions about your business

🧑‍💻 Data room

💡 Keep you docs organized

Bare minimum

  • 🔲 Incorporation documents (bylaws, certificate of incorporation etc.)

  • 🔲 Cap table

  • 🔲 Stock purchase agreements

  • 🔲 Stock option plan adoption & options granted

  • 🔲 Intellectual Property (IP) agreements (Proprietary information and Invention assignment agreement)

  • 🔲 Investment docs from the previous rounds (SAFEs, convertible notes)

Mature startup

  • 🔲 Corporate records & charter documents

  • 🔲 Business plans & financials

  • 🔲 Security issuances & Agreements concerning securities

  • 🔲 Intellectual Property (IP)

  • 🔲 Material Agreements

  • 🔲 Employees & Employees benefits

  • 🔲 Licenses, Insurances, Taxes

  • 🔲 Marketing & Research Materials

  • 🔲 Product

  • 🔲 Technology & Development

  • 🔲 Custom Information Requests

  • 🔲 Hardware

  • 🔲 Operation Processes & Flows


📑 Documents examples for investments

💡 Keep it standard, keep it simple. Use YCombinator templates

🙋‍♂️Questions?


Made by @spanarin

Feel free to ask me anything – via email (sergey@smartykit.io), on Twitter (@spanarin) or on LinkedIn.

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