
Oversubscribed: A Founder's Guide to Seed Fundraising - maxnuss
http://propellerdb.com/oversubscribed/
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maxnuss
Max (one of the authors) here. This is the book we wish we’d had when we were
first raising money for our startups. It starts with the basics—should you
even raise money at all?—and goes on to cover preparing your narrative,
finding and engaging investors, and actually getting money in the bank.

After raising a combined $4M for our seed rounds, Mike and I found ourselves
answering the same questions for other founders over and over. While there are
some good fundraising resources out there already (we link to many in the
book), we realized that there wasn’t a good source for the kind of guidance
we’d needed when we were first raising our companies’ rounds.

For example, there are lots of great blog posts about setting terms and
negotiating with investors. But when we were twenty-somethings outside of
Silicon Valley with limited experience and connections, we needed help just
figuring out how to even get in touch with angel investors in the first place.

Oversubscribed is free through September. We’d love to hear what the HN
community thinks, and we’re here to answer questions about the book, our
stories, fundraising in general, or anything else you’d like to ask!

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wilnerm13
Mike (the other author here). It was really fun to combine the non-fiction
framework around effectively raising funding with our personal war stories.

For example, in the book I dive deep into a story to illustrate that "it's
never a done deal until the money is in the bank."

One time, and angel investor saw me pitch at a pitch competition and committed
to our angel round. I got docs signed and everything, and then spent two
months getting other angels committed. I'd waited to get the money in the bank
from that first investor, and when I reached back out to get his investment
wired, he went completely cold. I ended up having to convince his assistant to
schedule a meeting with him in NYC.

When I took the bus up to NYC and met with him, he'd basically forgotten what
my startup did and made me re-pitch him on the spot and remind him how much he
committed investing. That wasn't the end of it though – I ended up having to
schedule another meeting like that for the sole purpose of picking up a check
when he got too busy to wire the money.

You'll find a more thorough explanation of that story (and more) in the book!

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mful
> One mistake founders make is thinking that they need to be finding a lead
> investor first. By allocating chunks of your round into portions that are
> available for three types of investors — lead VCs, follow VCs, and
> angels—you can create a lot more urgency out of the gate

...

> If you talk to a VC who says they’d be interested in following if you found
> a lead, you should tell them that you have limited spots for follow VCs

Really interesting way to create urgency when there may not be any (yet).

