How I ran my pre-seed fundraise — Bridgette Farrer Muir

Earlier this year, I raised a pre-seed round for my new company, Arrange, a platform that makes it easy to add reminders and to-dos to your calendar. Here’s how I ran my fundraising process.

*The first slide in my* *fundraising deck*.

Background

A little bit about me and the company:

I’m a first-time founder, and this was my first time raising venture capital
I’m a solo founder, and at the time of fundraising, I didn’t have any employees
Stage-wise, I was post-idea but pre-product. I’d spent ~6 months doing user validation and testing a handmade alpha version of the product. At the time of fundraising, I had some Figma designs of what the product would look like based on my alpha version, but no working product.

I had a few things working in my favor:

I have a compelling background for a startup founder. Prior to founding Arrange, I was on the founding team of Common, the nation’s largest coliving operator (though it certainly wasn’t when I joined). I stayed at Common for 5 years through a lot of growth and held a variety of executive roles, and even though Common is in a different industry, my operating and growth experience translated nicely to founding a startup.
I had a network of people who could make warm intros to investors. Not Stanford or Uber alum level, but strong enough to find a connection to 2/3 of the firms I targeted.

Process

There is no one right way to fundraise. That said, I was pretty intentional about how I ran my fundraising process, and believe any founder can run a good process, regardless of background.

Step 1: Define your fundraising strategy.

Before you actually start fundraising, the first step is deciding whether to raise money at all, and if so, determine if venture capital is the best source of financing for your business.

For me, fundraising was about more than raising funds – in addition to capital, I wanted to recruit the best partners and advisers possible for Arrange’s business. So I defined early on what I was looking for in investors:

I wanted to raise money from people who invest in early-stage companies for a living because I wanted investors who (a) had helped companies move from zero to one, and (b) had navigated the highs and lows of working with startups (in other words, not their first rodeo).
On top of that, I had a particular bias toward founders-turned-investors – I believe in the VC apprenticeship model, but I sought out former founders and early joiners/builders because I was betting on their company-building expertise and empathy. I also wanted sparring partners – as a solo founder, I considered investors an extension of my team.

A number of founders have asked me how I handled friends and family. I was fortunate to have a lot of interest from personal contacts, some of whom were strategic to Arrange from an advisory perspective (other founders, execs at large tech companies, etc.) and others who were less so. My criteria for evaluating this pool of investors was different: I wanted people I trusted who would do no harm. If you’re considering how to fit F&F into your fundraise, keep in mind that there’s a very real chance these people will never get their money back, so picture yourself delivering that news to them, and if you can’t imagine it, you probably shouldn’t take their checks.

Step 2: Do your homework.

Good news for founders: there are thousands of investment firms, each with unique teams, investment theses, geographical emphases, and ideal check sizes.

Bad news for founders: sifting through them all, and finding the right targets for you and your business, takes time.

I treated my fundraise like a sales process and borrowed best sales practices to run it efficiently. I started building out my CRM months before my first call, and invested a lot of time in researching early-stage firms and culling my target list.

Here is the information I captured in my CRM:

Firm info: firm name, partner name, title, location
Investment info: target stage (eg pre-seed vs seed vs later-stage), ideal check size, lead rounds or follow, etc.
Lead score: my own rating of the partner/firm based on investment info + my own weights (former founder, how much I admire the partner or firm, etc)
Mutual connections: who could intro me to the firm (more on that below)
Funnel info: the status of each conversation + next steps
Elimination: reason + notes. I actually eliminated many firms prior to starting fundraising, but I kept them in my CRM to maintain a record of why I’d eliminated them since I would lose that context if I’d just deleted them. Also, it’s very possible that firms I eliminated because they don’t invest in pre-seed financings could be a strong potential fit in the future.

A quick plug on tools: do yourself a favor and use whatever you’re comfortable with. I used Google Sheets for my fundraising CRM and it worked just fine. Adopting a new tool for the sake of doing so because it seems better or more feature-rich (be it Airtable, Notion, or whatever else) will only slow you down if you’re not yet versed in it. Use whatever you have the most comfort with.

Step 3: Put your best foot forward.

Once you’ve researched firms and defined your target list, you’ll need to figure out the best way to get in front of X person at Y firm.

This part took me almost as long as Step 2.

For each partner, I researched our mutual connections on LinkedIn. In many cases, I had multiple points of entry into a firm, and while this is certainly a good problem to have, I spent a lot of time figuring out who would make the strongest intro since it was not always obvious – the person who knows me best may not know the investor well, or vice versa.

My introducers were mainly:

Fellow founders: these intros were usually to their investors (as opposed to ones that had passed or that they were actively pursuing)
Former classmates/teammates: people who could vouch for me professionally

Once I determined who could make the best intro, I sent a personalized email that could be forwarded to each investment target with a little bit about why X partner at Y firm was on my radar. This also takes time, but definitely pays dividends – nobody (VCs included) wants to feel like they’re getting a generic mass email. Take the time to craft a unique note for each.

Another best practice that gets overlooked is keeping your introducers updated – if people in your network took the time to connect you to a potential investor, let them know how it went. Depending on your audience, these can be 1:1 notes or more general fundraising updates to the broader group.

One thing worth noting: loose ties played a really important role in my fundraising process, whether it was people I crossed paths with years ago (and very little since then) or people I’d connected with really recently. In a few cases, people I met after I began fundraising ended up making great intros to potential investors. So if you feel like you don’t have a deep pool of strong connectors, you can absolutely keep building this in real time.

Step 4: Set a timeline and pace accordingly.

Like any good project, fundraising has a start date and should always have a target end date that you are working against.

Here’s how I thought about pacing and timeline:

I tranched my fundraise into 3 parts. I started with ~30 targets and set a goal of moving through them (getting to a yes/no) in about a month. At that time, if I hadn’t gotten a yes yet, I’d move on to targets 31-60, and repeat for 61-90.
With this in mind, I told myself that if I hadn’t gotten a yes in 3 months/~100 calls, it would be a signal to me that something was not resonating, and I’d put the process on hold to step back and re-evaluate.

In terms of meetings/week, this was not a particularly aggressive timeline, and I’ve seen founders do it much faster, packing into a week what I did in a month. Again, there’s no right answer here, but this pacing worked for two reasons:

I started my fundraise in March of this year, when meetings were occurring by default over Zoom. And while it made it easy to meet with VCs regardless of location, I found myself needing more padding between meetings to take a breather.
I didn’t yet have a team (save for a few part-time contractors) and knew that I needed to carve out time to continue moving the business forward – since I was still working alone, if I spent all my time fundraising, I wouldn’t be making any product progress. I tried to balance these.

Just like having sales targets informs BD activities, having a clear timeline and milestones for your fundraise will help you understand how you’re performing against your own goals and know when it’s time to make a change in your approach.

Step 5: Get in the right mindset.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by fundraising for the first time. Here’s how I got in the right place mentally:

I’m a big fan of Brené Brown’s FFT framework. Doing new things is hard and scary. The good news is that it’s only the first time once! You can do it. Keep in mind that every successful VC-back founder you admire also had to navigate their first fundraise.
Remember that you’re looking for a market of one. You don’t need broad adoption to be successful – you just need one investor to say yes, and the rest will almost certainly fall into place. (It took me 6 weeks to get first yes and less than 2 weeks to get fully subscribed.)
By this math, prepare yourself for the vast majority of investors saying no. No one likes being turned down, but it’s not personal – so many stars need to align for an investor to say yes and the bulk of the reasons why it’s not a fit have nothing to do with you or your company. Don’t take it personally.

So much of being a founder is managing your own psychology and for better or worse, fundraising is no different – so make sure you’re in the right headspace before you start.

Conclusion

In the end, I was happy with the outcome of my fundraise – I raised the bulk of my round from three early-stage firms I really admire: Unusual Ventures, Flybridge, and XFactor Ventures. And yes, having a compelling background and strong network certainly helped. But the good news for founders and first-time fundraisers is that anyone can run a good process, regardless of prior experience.

If you’re embarking on your fundraising journey for the first time, hopefully this was helpful. And if you enjoyed this post, check out my other fundraising post on what I learned fundraising.

Interested in learning more about Arrange? Join our beta here or check out our open roles here.