“Ranktab CEO: How invisu.me helped in our Seed Round Fundraising Process”.

At invisu, our #1 wish is for startups to succeed in creating the page that gets them meetings. And when these meetings lead to fundraising — we’re doing a happy dance right along with the Founders!

I recently interviewed Francisco Ruiz, Co-Founder and CEO of Ranktab, a visualization tool that helps teams make smarter, faster group decisions. Ranktab was selected for business acceleration and Angel investment by Plug and Play in January 2015 and moved to Silicon Valley from Mexico for their 10 week program. After securing a Pre-Seed round they continued their acceleration and seed round in the Hackers and Founders Accelerator.

Today, over 1.3 M decisions have been made with Ranktab and their solution is being used by corporations, SMBs and governments globally. Francisco is just closing Ranktab’s Seed Round (undisclosed amount) using invisu as one of his key tools for fundraising. Francisco was generous enough to share some of his insights which we hope will help you all successfully use invisu to help with your fundraising process:

Ranktab — Decide Smarter Together

• Donna Griffit: Thanks for meeting with me Francisco! Congratulations! So how did you find out about invisu?
• Francisco Ruiz: I found invisu through the Google Launchpad program where it is offered as part of the perks. We had been accepted into 2 accelerators in Silicon Valley — Plug and Play and Hackers and Founders. We suddenly had lots of events, pitches — and I realized I needed a follow up process for after meeting a potential investor.
• DG: What were you using before invisu?
• FR: Before invisu, I would send a deck via an email and never know if they reached the investor and what the level of interest was. That was frustrating for me because often we never heard back and had no way of knowing why. Many investors are prompt in their replies, but you have to wonder which part of the documents you send were most interesting to them, what made them respond?
• DG: So what made you choose invisu?
• FR: Investors don’t always have time to go through a deck and much rather prefer an investor brief or one-pager. Sending a deck can be problematic — you aren’t there to explain what you mean so you must hit all points precisely but not over-explain. With invisu, all the important points are there- the process is straightforward . What was really valuable in using Invisu was it’s powerful wizard to extract the main points of your company that are relevant to investors. It made us think — how are we different? How do we compare to our competitors? It helped me generate the [magic quadrant] chart that I would have had to design on my own. It guided me through the questions that investors would ask me. I think Entrepreneurs miss a lot of these points in their decks and from an investor’s point of view, elements collected in invisu’s wizard such as allocation of funds is important. After completing the process, invisu extracts the right information and puts it in a really, really nice, professional format to provide a great image of the company.
• DG: How many investors did you send to and how many responded?
• FR: I sent it out to about 50 investors. I was called in for about 14 meetings and have closed 4 investments so far.
• DG: How did the investors respond to your invisu page?
• FR: When an investor receives tens of decks a day and has to go through them all, invisu has already answered the questions. Missing information is no longer the issue, it’s just a question of being aligned with the investor’s investment thesis. Investors told me they liked it, I saw how they browsed through, what their main interests were.
• DG: Can you give some tips to other Founders using invisu?
• FR: A process like this is very valuable. There are questions that will come up eventually with one investor or another so do yourself a favor, go through the entire invisu process, this will help you successfully pitch your startup. It not only helped me get the meetings, It helped me be better prepared for the meetings because I knew how to answer the questions that mattered to investors. Oh — also, add your invisu page to Angellist page — investors like this!!!
• DG: Did you know that if you go to your send page, click “Add Investor” and put in “Angellist” in the investor name and save it, it will generate a unique page link which you can then copy and paste into your Angellist profile? Then you can track specifically when people open your invisu page from Angellist.
• FR: Good to know!
• DG: You can create a link for any investor by doing the same and then copy/pasting into an email. One last question — can you tell us how much you raised?
• FR: I’m not able to disclose that but we’ve secured enough runway to hit the milestones required for our next fundraise.
• DG: That’s fantastic!!! Thanks Francisco and good luck!!!

Have a success story to share with us? Email me at donna@invisu.me and we’ll be thrilled to share. Are you fundraising? Join invisu.me as a Founder and get your sleek, trackable send-out deck that get’s you the meetings!