The Seed Round Rollercoaster: Tips, Tricks & Advice for Raising Your First Seed Round.
TLDR; Raising a seed round is difficult and there is no exact science behind it. We were lucky enough to close our seed round 2 years ago, and I spent some time this week reflecting on our fundraising process.
“Get ready to ride the roller coaster.”
That was the first piece of advice I received when I left Google to pursue the startup life. Reflecting back on this advice 2 years later, I realized how true this quote actually was.
Let’s first break down the different parts of a roller coaster: 🎢 👇

Train — The vehicle which transports passengers around the circuit.
Launch track — The part of the rollercoaster where the train is accelerated to full speed quickly.
Lift hill — The initial upward section of a rollercoaster that transports the rollercoaster to an elevated point
Drive tire — The tire that’s used to propel a train along the track. General this is used to help the train go up steep inclines.
Break run — The section of the track meant to slow or stop a rollercoaster train. They are usually hidden from the train and under the track.
Tester hill — The small hill following the first one. Usually this is less dramatic in terms of size.
Head chopper — the structure of the ride, theming or another section of track comes close to the rider’s heads, or at least appears to do so.
Let’s now break down my experience raising a seed round: 🌱

Company (Train) - What is your company vision and how are you going to execute on it? Investors want to hear your long term vision for the company, however, more importantly, they want to hear about the people that will be executing on the vision. In fact, I kept track of the questions I was asked in my first 43 investor conversations, and the most common question I got asked was “why is your team uniquely positioned to pull this off”?
Nicole Glaros from Techstars puts is simply.
“We put a heavy emphasis on team. In fact, we like to say that we look for 5 things in an application:
1.Team
2.Team
3.Team
4.Market
5.Idea”
Initial Traction (Launch track) - The process begins the second you start researching investors. There are many different websites you can use to find investors however I would suggest starting with Angel.co, Mattermark (use the 30 day free trial), and Crunchbase. Make sure you look for investors that are actively investing in your market/vertical.
Your first outreach should come by way of introduction. It seems difficult but as the CEO of your company, you should be able to hustle and utilize your network to find introductions. LinkedIn is a great source to find mutual connections, however the best introduction to an investor is from one of their portfolio companies that have made them money already.
During your first meeting you want to ask for advice, not money.
“Ask for advice and you will get money, ask for money and you will get advice”
After the conversation, you should be following up with them regularly to check in to give updates on your progress. Investors put their money in lines and not dots. They want to see how much your KPIs have grown since you lasted updated them.
It really helps to stay organized when you are doing your initial list gathering and outreach. I used Streak to keep organized with these stages:

1st Few Investor Meeting (Lift hill) - The process is now accelerating, get ready for the ride. Your 1st few meetings will be a mixed bag of emotions. You will leave some meetings thinking you are going to close the round quickly, and other meetings where you will wonder if your company will ever raise money. It’s easy to get caught up in an emotional whirlwind when this happens. Here are couple tips that might help.
- Know your elevator pitch and answers to all of the important questions. The worst thing you can do is go into the meeting unprepared.
- Make sure you do your research before going into each investor meeting. You should know the types of companies they like to invest in and 1–2 facts about them personally. This will allow you to connect on a level outside of business. If they are investing in you and the team , they want to know that y’all can connect on all levels.
- Have actionable next steps after the meeting. Make sure you leave the meeting knowing when to follow up and what to follow up with.
- After each meeting, write down the questions you were asked and keep a running list. You should have answers to all of these questions and continue to refine them based on feedback.
Introductions to Other Investors (Drive tire) - This will accelerate the process for you. If there is an investor that likes what you are doing and is willing to introduce you to other investors; Thats huge a win. This widens your network and is a good sign that they are considering investing. **I had a rule of thumb that if I thought an investor was genuinely interested in investing, I would ask them for introductions to at least 1other investor they do deals with.
Not Enough Traction (Break Run) - The first downturn of the rollercoaster. You will go from having a bunch of 1st meetings, to getting some investors telling you that they are not interested or that you don’t have enough traction.
Find A Lead Investor (Tester hill)- So you now have 50% of the round committed by a couple different investors, but like most startups you are still looking for your lead investor.
Oversubscribed Round (Head chopper)- After hearing a lot of no’s, you’ll finally get a lead investor that will lead and help you oversubscribe the round. No matter how close you think you are to not getting this round done, it’s just a head chopper, you’ll get through it.
I’d love to hear about your fundraising roller coaster. Shoot me a message todd@tryadhawk.com or comment below.
Some other great resources :
25 epic, must read-blog posts about fundraising — Alex Iskold
How to raise money — Ycombinator
Invest in lines not dots — Mark Suster
How I think about seed investing as a VC — Brad Feld
