How to Attract the Best Crypto VC
This is Part Three in an 13-part Alpha Growth series breaking down the problems every blockchain project has and needs to solve to grow and scale. New to the series? Start here.
We’ve established the first and second problems every crypto project faces in the previous posts in this series. Once you’ve defined the problem you’re trying to solve and created a narrative on the solution, here’s what’s next:
The third problem: you need funding from investors.
If you’re not raising money at the beginning, then you won’t have a company. For the vast majority of founders, this third problem boils down to one thing we all learned in kindergarten.
Make friends.
If you’re not good at making friends, if you have zero network, you didn’t go to a top school or work at a top company, you’re going to have an incredibly tough time getting investors. Bro, just the truth.
There is one way to step around this. It’s worth mentioning because it’s really the only exception. The only way you can sit back behind your computer screen and justify being head’s down: traction. But serious traction. Like you have the product, you have users, you have growth. You just need money to grow more.
Traction is the easiest thing for an investor to invest in, but it’s rare. It’s really, really hard to build to that point without raising money. If you can do it, it’s phenomenal. So if you can do that, stop reading. You don’t need to do any of this. Investors will come to you. We know this because that’s literally what the Alpha Growth Data Directory allows for.
Most founders don’t have product, users and growth before investment. Without traction, we’re back to:
You need friends.
The best way to land investment is to have investors as friends or have founder friends who’ve gotten investment in the past. Then you get introductions from your investor and founder friends to other investors.
That’s it. That’s the whole entire thing.
Now say you don’t have an investor or founder network. Can this be a meritocracy? Yes. But it takes work. Say you didn’t go to a top school and you haven’t worked at a top company. How are you going to connect with the people who can then introduce you to other founders and investors?
Pump your socials.
Because: distribution.
Distribution is huge. Grow to 10K followers or more on Twitter, Telegram, Medium, Substack and the job becomes so much easier.
To recap (and this might be painful):
- Getting funded can be a meritocracy, but you have to do the work to make the friends who will connect you with investors
- If you don’t work at a top company, if you did not go to a top school, if you do not have a network that you’ve been working on since the time you were 15, it’s going to be really fucking hard to raise money for your first company.
- If you don’t have a history of successes, you haven’t raised money before and you weren’t employee number 20 or less at a company that went big, it’s going to be really hard.
- Sure, maybe you have an MVP or code base. You still need other social proof.
- Invest in your socials. Create a following, create a Medium account, build up an email list, promote everything on Twitter.
I recently invested in an up and coming game that spun out from DeFi Kingdoms. The founder has 12K followers on Twitter and 3K in Medium. He’s already got a fanbase.
He’s got distribution.
Here’s why I care about that as an investor: distribution — like a good tech team — de-risks product.
If you can de-risk distribution or you can de-risk product, you already have half of the solution you need to convince an investor to ape in. If you have got both, you’re a fire investment.
Investors want to see:
- Technical talent building the product
- Distribution locked anytime technical talent is hired out
- Business development or partnerships signals that show you can use investment to build and grow
If you are early days, make friends make friends make friends. If you’re the hacker on your team, if you’re the hustler on sales, get out of your own way and:
- Have conversations
- Schedule meetings
- Go to events
- Schedule dinners
- Hold AMAs
- Build your socials
- Help other people out
- Invest in others when you can
Quick story before we wrap. I said everything I’m saying here to a client. And he goes, Bryan, “I don’t have time to take meetings. I’m doing sales and product.”
And I told him:
Stop. You need to lead.
Hire somebody to do sales. Hire somebody to do product. You are the one who needs to be talking, putting the vision out there. You can’t hide behind your computer. Yes, you need to make sure everyone else on the team is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. But what you’re supposed to be doing is leading and getting the money at the beginning so there is a future.
If you’re interested in learning about investment, biz dev and growth strategies for your project, we encourage you to connect on Twitter @bryancolligan. Join our Telegram for members-only alpha on projects we’re watching and DYOR resources for creating growth, credibility and engagement for your project.
