Fletcher Richman from Galvanize Ventures shares the best, most effective way for founders to fundraise.

1. The Hacker’s Guide
to Fundraising
by: Fletcher Richman, Platform Manager for Galvanize Ventures

2. Fletcher Richman
Platform Manager for Galvanize Ventures
I’m creating a series of guides on how to hack the
processes people normally do by hand, allowing for
massive time savings and improved results.
Using a combination of productivity hacking tactics, web
scraping tools, creative data sources, and scripting calls,
I promise I’ll save you tons of time.

3. Find Investors Outside of Your Network

4. Find Investors Outside of Your Network
To start, a great strategy is to find as many companies as possible who have
received investment recently who are in some way similar to your company.
• Similar Location
• Similar Vertical
• Other Characteristic
One of the best places to do this is on AngelList.

5. Find Investors Outside of Your Network
EXA MPLE: Let’s assume you are starting a Colorado based SaaS company.
Find all Colorado based startups on AngelList who have raised money
• Go to angel.co/companies
• Set filters:
• Location is “Colorado” (or wherever you want)
• Type is “Startup”
• Under ranges set the lowest amount of funding received to be at least $10k
so that it only shows funded startups.
• Export to get a list of funded companies in your area.

6. Find Investors Outside of Your Network

7. Find Investors Outside of Your Network
Our goal is to find the people who invested in these companies. We’ll query the
AngelList API for each of these companies, and figure out who their investors are.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to code, I’ll handle that part.
• Create a new app on AngelList’s API, here: https://angel.co/api/oauth/clients.
• Once you’ve created your app, you’ll need token that is created. You can set the
two URLs to be anything (http://google.com is fine if you aren’t feeling creative.)

8. Find Investors Outside of Your Network

9. No More Copy and Pasting

10. No More Copy and Pasting
Next up, I’m gonna give you a little script that runs through your list of companies
and spits out a list of investors.
This script finds the first and last name of investors listed on those companies
AngelList profiles, and gives you a list of their website (if available) and AngelList
profile.

11. No More Copy and Pasting
Use it at: gum.co/alhack

12. No More Copy and Pasting
How to run the script (you’ll need a Mac):
• Download
• Unzip it and open up the file called al_investors.rb using a text editor (I prefer
Sublime Text).
• Add your list of investors by copy pasting the list of AngelList URLs from the
csv you downloaded into the appropriate line near the top of the file.
• Add your token from the application you just registered at angel.co/api.

13. No More Copy and Pasting
The top of your file should look
something like this, with more
companies and your own API key:

14. No More Copy and Pasting
Now, open up your Terminal application on your Mac. Run the following two
commands to change directories to the appropriate folder and run the task:
cd ~/Downloads
ruby al_investors.rb
If you run into trouble with the second line of code, double check that it is the
correct file name and make sure the edits you made with your API Key and list of
URLs are in the file called “al_investors.rb” in your Downloads folder.

15. No More Copy and Pasting
Check your downloads folder for a
CSV called “investor_names.csv”. It
should look something like this:

16. Get in Touch With Potential Investors

17. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
I’d recommend setting a simple but robust tracking system, or CRM. My personal,
free preference is Streak – it keeps track of stages right inside of gmail, handles
mail merge, and its free for up to 5 collaborators, with a limit on shared boxes (up
to 50).

18. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
Install it from their site, then create a
new pipeline:

19. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
It will automatically create a pretty
solid set of stages for you, my only
two edits are to
• change “Sent Demo” to “Needs
Follow up”
• and added a column after “Lead” for
“Contacted”

20. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
Add any personal connections
manually to the appropriate stage of
the pipeline to make sure you’re
keeping track of everyone.
Import the list of investors from
AngelList into your CRM. First, create
three new free form columns for your
new data – Website, and AngelList Url.
Make sure it’s all capitalized correctly.
Create one more column: Email
Address. Then, select the “Import
from CSV” option under more.

21. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
All of the rows from the CSV of
AngelList investors are now in your
Streak Pipeline!

22. Get in Touch With Potential Investors
There are two options to get in touch with these investors:
1. Warm Introductions - Ideally, you want to try to get a warm introduction from
someone who is excited about what you are doing.
2. Cold Introductions - I’ll show you some cool hacks for how to get their email
address and send them a cold email.

23. Warm Introductions

24. Warm Introductions
There are two great tools to find a second degree connections to your potential
investors.
1. Linkedin
2. Conspire
For Linkedin, do a simple search for the full name of the person in your Streak
pipeline. I prefer to use the search view to find mutual connections.

25. Warm Introductions
For example, here are the search
results for Chris Nolet, the first person
in my pipeline:

26. Warm Introductions
I can click the little arrow and see my 2nd degree connections to Chris. This is
much quicker and easier than actually visiting his profile.
If you don’t have a second degree connection and the person works for an
investment firm or VC, another option is to just search the name of the firm and
find out who you are most closely connected with.

27. Warm Introductions
Conspire analyzes your email and the email of other people who use the service
to figure out the frequency of communication and show you the closest
connection based on that. You can search by name or by company to find 2nd
and 3rd degree connections.
When you do ask for introductions, ask the person to do a double opt-in intro.
You should give your connection an email that they can simply copy/paste or
forward along to the person who you are asking to be introduced to. This will
preserve social capital and make sure that your introductions lead to good
conversations.

28. Cold Introductions

29. Cold Introductions
For the potential investors whose emails you can’t find, it’s time to get creative.
Here are a few great tools:
• Viola Norbert that will find someone’s email address given a first name, last
name, and domain.
• Email Hunter is another great alternative to find anyone at a specific company,
with 200 free requests per month.
• Twitter can also be a great way to initiate conversation.

30. Cold Introductions
One final option is to use this email permutator to get all the possible email
combinations, paste it into your compose box in gmail, and using both the
Rapportive and FullContact plugin to plugin mouse over each email and see if
anything comes up. Rapportive only matches on LinkedIn email, and Full Contact is
able to match on other social networks.

31. Cold Introductions
Once you have their emails, reach out
with something like this:

32. Cold Introductions
The goal here should be to get a meeting, not to get them to write a check right
away. If they respond and seem interested, the next email should provide them
with a bunch of options of times that they can pick from. I like either Assistant.to
or Sunrise Meet to make that process simpler.
For your link to your deck, Docsend is wonderful, and will ensure you know who is
looking at your deck (it often gets forwarded around internally, which is a good
sign).
If you want to create good momentum around your fundraise, try to schedule
meetings all in a 1 to 2 week period. Investors talk to each other, and if you’re
meeting with them all at once that’s often seen as a positive signal.

33. Follow Up

34. Follow Up
As those email go out, make sure to move each person to the Contacted stage in
your investor pipeline. Use Streak’s email tracking functionality if you’re interested
in whether or not your emails get opened, and then use Docsend to understand
who has actually looked at your deck.

35. Follow Up
• Go back every few days to see who has stalled out in the pipeline, but might
have opened the deck or responded to an email and not followed up.
• Give them a quick nudge if you haven’t heard from them in 5-7 days.
• Don’t send more than 2 or 3 emails without a response (that’s just annoying),
but don’t be afraid to be persistent.
• If all else fails, you can also try a gif or something else creative in a 3rd or 4th
cold email.

36. Follow Up
It’s up to you to nail those in person meetings, impress the investors, and get
some momentum behind your fundraise. This should at least get you past the cold
start problem.