
How I Turned a Cold Email into a $2.5M Seed Round - r_singh
https://blog.usejournal.com/how-i-turned-a-cold-email-into-a-2-5m-seed-round-c33bd80f5590
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blackrock
It seems that getting that extra seed round, when you already have recurring
revenue, should be the easy part.

Since you already had spent all the time and money to do the initial product
engineering. Your database is in place, your web servers are online, and you
can handle a modicum of traffic.

So, you have proven that a market exists for your product.

Then the extra VC seed money, is just for the major marketing and sales push,
and to pay for extra servers. And these days, everyone just hosts it on the
AWS cloud, so virtual servers are just a click away. There's no need to
actually hire an army of Linux system administrators to handle your network
anymore.

My question is: How difficult is it to get Angel or VC money, to build out
your Powerpoint idea?

This is just the initial idea, that you have sketched out on a paper, with
maybe some big ideas on how it can fulfill a market need. This engineering
effort will take some time to flesh out, and it will take money to hire a
small staff of engineers, and to just pay yourself to work on it.

~~~
r_singh
The bar for milestones to raise money has increased a lot over the last two
decades. What was 1M users is now 10M+ users. It's also worth noting that a
lot of tools make growth at a faster rate possible as compared to before.

The increased difficulty of raising seed during idea stage is apparent when
you observe the increase in YC companies that have already launched with an
MVP and are increasing traction working up to the demo day.

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r_singh
This post shows a helpful cold email pitch structure for startups trying to
reach out to investors without prior introductions. The author spent hours
over a period of time honing this template before cold-email-pitching to the
same investor for the second time.

Would love to see more examples of cold email pitches that received responses
from investors!

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
It's all about "clicking" with the investor. I always say it's not what you
say, it's how you say and also who you are.

Investing should be science but unfortunately it's an art and VC's that try to
use data for investments implode: [https://www.axios.com/social-capital-
collapse-0c3257ab-b599-...](https://www.axios.com/social-capital-
collapse-0c3257ab-b599-4047-b5cc-5d465419b373.html)

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olooney
> Explaining what Mapistry does and the problem we solve to investors is not
> easy. Customers get it because they have the problem, but investors never
> have the problem we’re addressing, so this paragraph was a tough one.

Explaining the problem is only half the battle. You also have to prove that a
large number of potential customers actually have said problem and are willing
to pay money for a solution, and you need more than an clear elevator story to
do that - you need hard data.

