Even though not all replies are going to be positive, any reply is an opportunity to build a relationship that could ultimately get you a warm introduction. 

Who is this for?

Whether you have had a successful raise before or are new to fundraising, all start-ups are facing the same challenges. The platforms used to raise capital are over saturated, investors are getting tired of constant pitch emails, and building a pipeline of investors is extremely time consuming. 

This solution is for those who want to create a real impact on their fundraising efforts by doing things with a proper strategy built by expert marketers for founders.

This is for start-ups who want to stand out and have a steady stream of qualified investors so they can consistently pitch and refine their initiatives to quickly raise capital and grow their business.  

How Do We Do it?

So how do we do this?  Your goal is to start conversations with qualified investors who are going to give you the space to share information and eventually pitch. I am going to go over the 3 steps that create a successful investor relations campaign. 

Who Am I?

Before we jump in, I’m Michael Mohammadi, CEO and Co-Founder of Storm X Capital, where we have helped start-up founders raise 100’s of thousands to millions of dollars using multi-channel investor relations. 

Resulting in over $10,000,000 raised and over $25,000,000 currently being raised.

My Co-Founder and I merged his experience in start-up fundraising, with my experience in direct to consumer marketing and business development to create a system that values the fundamentals of fundraising while harnessing on the often overlooked, marketing and strategic side of outreach. 

We aim to provide the most value to start-up founders who are looking to raise capital, not spend it on huge retainers for services that ultimately don’t work. 

Now, let’s get to it.

Step 1: Where and How To Find Investors

To start, we need to identify the best individuals to target. When we see start-ups reaching out to investors, most of the time they are purchasing lists, using scraping tools, or subscribing to over saturated platforms that every other start-up is using. These are extremely ineffective because you are reaching out to random, unqualified people.

If you want that strategy to actually work, you would need to find lists of thousands of investors and pray that some are qualified, and that your emails won’t end up in the spam folders for those that are.

A lot of the companies that we work with come from marketing agencies that email blast proprietary databases of 1000’s of investors at a time. This results in a flood of negative responses, ruining of your email reputation, and a very poor first impression of your start-up.

What we recommend and do for our clients is provide a dedicated data researcher to hand-pick and qualify investor contacts so any outreach is only sent to qualified investors that can actually provide value, and have a much higher chance of responding. 

Where do we find these contacts?

We use a variety of the most up-to-date sources including recent events, current investor groups, and any relevant sources depending on your industry.

Market research and data is extremely important and we find that when we collect anywhere between 300-500 hand-picked contacts, we are able to get up to 15% reply rates resulting in 45-60 new conversations with investors per month. 

Step 2: What To Say To Investors

Once we do our research to identify who and where our ideal investors are, we have to take a look at the copy that is being sent.

Almost every time we look at a start-ups message to investors, we notice that it is usually a long email briefing the investor of every little detail of their business plan and investment opportunity. 

You have to think, why would the investor care enough to read that email. That sounds harsh but we have to give an investor a reason to read the email and a reason to reply.

I like to say that copywriting is just giving the reader permission to read the next line. Are your emails doing that?

We had a blockchain company that launched their campaign with us and we didn’t see the best results in the first week so we changed the formatting of the email slightly by adjusting the call to action and switching one sentence. This slight change resulted in a surge of replies from investors asking her to send her pitch deck over. 

The Copy matters. A lot.