1st-time founder meets 120 VCs— closes $2.7M in 5 weeks, 10x oversubscribed. Here's the step-by-step guide to close a round. | Andrew Rea, Founder of Taxwire

Andrew spoke with 120+ VCs to raise a $1.5M pre-seed round. He closed $2.7M and had demand for many millions more. He devoted 90% of his time to fundraising, but only took weeks from the first meetings to close. 

99% of founders I meet do not fundraise at this level. It takes them longer to close, they have fewer choices and raise less. 

This is a specific, detailed and tactical guide to closing a round. If you're ever going to raise, you need to listen.

Why you should listen

• Why talking to more investors will help you raise 10x faster.
• How to use an investment memo to articulate your thoughts and as a base to build a pitch deck
• How to get warm introductions to VCs
• How to take control of investor meetings and put VCs on their heels

Keywords
fundraising, seed round, investors, memo, deck, pitch, negotiating terms, trust, conviction, dilution

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:02)How Taxwire Thought About Fundraising
(00:04:02) The Start of Taxwire
(00:06:32) Making a Memo Before a Deck
(00:09:50) Reaching Out
(00:16:10) Wanting to Oversubscribe
(00:21:32) Keeping Control and Qualifying Investors
(00:31:10) The Basic Structure of the Pitch
(00:34:24) Target Close Day
(00:39:01) The Timeline for Fundraising and Meetings
(00:44:41) Deciding Who to Accept Funds From
(00:50:18) One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Andrew: 0:14

I think you can finesse the game a little bit, and some people do this really well. It’s not what I did. But if you got an offer to join Y Combinator tomorrow and you went out and shopped that, I guarantee you, you could probably get a fund to throw down a term sheet. I think angels are some of the most helpful investors to have on your cap table, but a lot of times the best time to go after them is after you’ve got the momentum and oversubscribed or whatever. We had 800 committed on 1.5, and then we were at 1.1 the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Then Friday, we hit 1.8 or something like that. There’s three days before Thanksgiving. Then by end of Wednesday, we were at 5 on what was supposed to be 1.5.

Pablo Srugo: 0:38

Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I’m Pablo. I’m a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew: 0:55

Thanks for having me, man.

Pablo Srugo: 0:56

Listen, man, we’re just jumping right in here. I was scrolling LinkedIn as I do as a busy, busy VC. That’s half my job. No kidding. I saw your post on there and it said that to raise a pre-seed, I think it was like you spoke with over 100, well over 100 investors, 120, and then you said you actually had another 200 names on the list that you hadn’t gone through. I must admit, especially for those early rounds, those pre-seed rounds, it’s not something I see commonly. I hear it talked about, hey, you should talk to a lot of people, all sort of thing. But if I actually am honest with the founders I meet, the founders I speak with, the ones in our portfolio, how many of them go and talk to that quantity of VCs and truly make it a process? Very, very few.

Obviously, it worked for you. You raised, you closed that round, and I want to walk through all of that. I want to get super tactical today on your thinking about it, the strategy, how you implemented it, how you did it from intros all the way to meetings to the deck to the data room, if you built one, whatever. I’ll stop there. Maybe just as a first question, how did you think about fundraiser? Why did you even approach it this methodically?

Andrew: 2:02

Great questions, and I agree with you the way you characterize it. The reason I wrote this post is I was getting asked about this a lot by other founders that were about to raise a similar-ish round. The only people who’d ever really told this to me had been other founders, and it had been one-on-one. It was not something that you really saw, or even sometimes no one would tell me, but I would just observe. I had a friend that raised around maybe six months before us. It’s actually a lot of people to get about a similar size round done.

I think it’s just one of those things where people want to act like, man, we just went out there and we’re so great. Our company is so interesting and we’re so compelling as founders that the third VC I met, they just gave us a term sheet and wired money to our bank accounts. All the more so in an era where it does seem like whenever you hear about a fundraise, it seems like there’s a ton of momentum and everyone’s acting like – it just seemed like, of course, that was so inevitable. I think people just don’t realize how much volume even for a really successful raise it can take.

The way I thought about it was we had hit the point with where our company was at where we knew it was time to raise money. We didn’t even take it as a given. When we were getting started, they were going to raise venture for this. It just eventually became apparent that we wanted to build the most ambitious company possible. We wanted to capitalize that the right way. There was a clear case to raise venture. Then two, it was clear that we needed to do it to build the best version of the company we needed to build.

Then in terms of actually getting around on, I think that I’ve done a little bit of just tiny check angel investing. I’ve worked at other startups and I have a lot of friends that are founders. I had seen it from their perspective and I just knew also to the market sucked, especially end of last year. I think it’s a little bit better right now. I was just expecting it’s going to just take a lot of those. Also, to the pre-seed stage especially, it’s like hopes and dreams. You’re talking about a team mostly. It’s mostly a team in a market.

Pablo Srugo: 4:02

Yeah, set some context, like how old was your company, and then more or less how much you’re raising, like sub 1 million, one to two, four to five, what were you – 

Andrew: 4:08

Even this gets into some nuances here. A company I was head of growth app before this was early stage startup raised from injuries then. They had acquihire-type exit early last year. I left a little bit right before the acquisition finished. I’d spent a couple months on what eventually became this company. I’d say I officially started working on what became this company Taxwire in April of last year. I don’t even think I really was like, okay, for sure, this is going to become a company until probably the end of May.

April through August, you can think of as me recruiting co-founders, doing a ton of customer discovery and iterating on the product I thought we wanted to build. Then August, my co-founder came in, and then we went out and raised – I think we have officially kicked off this pre-seed raise, I guess late September, early October. Actually, we started prepping for it in late September. We didn’t really start raising until October. We went out to raise 1.5 and we ended up raising about a little over 2.7.

The reason I said that, that amount mattered. When we were there, before I forget, we did a bunch of work to get our materials right. We really, really understood our customer and our market and stuff like that before we went out and raised. Then we had two customers that were paying us, but it was almost pre-product. We had a prototype, but it wasn’t really a full product, but a very clear idea of what it was we were going to build – 

Pablo Srugo: 5:35

The way I think about it is everything we’re talking about here is really process and optimization. It’s like the 20% of a successful round. The 80% comes before. It’s the actual team.

Andrew: 5:45

Yeah, totally.

Pablo Srugo: 5:46

The actual product, the actual work you’ve done. You have to be investable. If you’re investable, you’re in a good market, you as a team are investable, and you’ve got real meat to it, then the rest of it is just getting your story down and then running a process. It’s a ton of work, but those things are actually – all of the process stuff works for you if you’ve done the first piece. If you haven’t done the first piece, if you or your team or whatever is not very investable, or you don’t really have an investable business, investable market, it’s going to be really, really hard to fundraise because it’s just all the other stuff only works if that first piece is done.

Walk me through the steps. You decide, okay, we’re going to fundraise. We’re going to do this. First thing is, do you work on a deck? Do you work on a data room? Do you start talking to people right away? What’s the first thing you – 

Andrew: 6:32

I started working on a memo actually originally. That’s partially how I just think much better. I have to be able to write something out to really be able to articulate it well. A lot of how I think through problems is just to start writing something down. We wrote a memo first, and then eventually we built a deck. We used the deck primarily and most of initial meetings and memo was more of a diligence thing. But I wrote a memo, eventually built a deck.

Pablo Srugo: 6:58

There’s actually a question I got no long ago. It was like, hey, what do you think about memos? People are telling me that slide decks aren’t that cool anymore. Memos are cool. I’m like, man, I don’t know. For me on the receiving end, send me a deck.

Andrew: 7:08

Yeah. I think they serve different purposes. People talk about using one or the other. Ideally, I would personally prefer to just use a memo, but the reality is most VCs, no offense, are just going to go like, boop, boop, boop.

Pablo Srugo: 7:19

That’s the problem. I’m lazy.

Andrew (00:07:22)

Yeah. I can see the metrics on my docs, and the average investor spends between one and two minutes max in my deck. You really don’t have a ton of time. I think the deck is great for getting the intro and setting the initial context. The memo is good for once you’ve pulled someone’s attention, and they’re actually serious about maybe investing in your business.

Pablo Srugo: 7:41

That makes total sense. Your order was memo first, get the thoughts out, get the narrative down, and then use that to create a deck.

Andrew: 7:48

Yeah. It just worked out that way, but it’s actually first, I was wanting to use the memo. I’ll be honest, instead of the deck, I didn’t want to do the deck. I got over myself and did the deck before we went out to market. I’m glad we did the memo because I think it was – I actually felt like I had wasted my time initially. Then later on when we got through diligence and a pretty compressed timeline and I heard back from all the investors that we went through diligence with, it was a pretty big piece of them building conviction. It was useful, but it was just served a different purpose than – 

Pablo Srugo: 8:19

I could see it, especially for pre-seed, which you said there’s not much meat there. It’s really team market fit. It’s a team, it’s the market. Having some written out that walks somebody through how you’re thinking about it I think can help a lot. But yeah, it’s way deeper in the funnel. They like the idea. They’ve met you. They like it. They’re trying to build conviction. Also, some people forget in many cases, people work in a fund. They got other people they need to convince. They can share those with other people. They can use that to create their own internal pitch. I could see that serving a great purpose there.

Andrew: 8:49

It’s the internal pitch and most funds are going to write their own memo. It’s like you’re saving them some work. The big thing is just demonstrating rigor of thought. I see too, even if you’re a little further along, ultimately still there’s a ton of risk at this stage. People are underwriting not that you have all the answers, but that they believe in how you think about the problem. Do they trust you, and do they trust your judgment, and how you’re going to go build a business?

You’re doing a memo on just the way you answer questions. It’s not about that you have every answer. It’s that do they trust how you think about it, how you got to the conclusions you’ve got to? Then engaging with you through that like, do they just believe in you? Doing things writing a memo and being able to articulate why and how you think about something either increases or decreases an investor’s conviction.

Pablo Srugo: 9:37

Walk me through this. How premeditated was the reach out? Did you know ahead of time, I’m going to reach out to hundreds of people? Or did you have some conversations or something happened and then you decided, you know what, we really need to expand this, we need to go wider? How did that play out?

Andrew: 9:50

A little bit of both. I know an above average maybe for some – I’m fairly young, but I’ve got a decent network of investors. I was relatively confident that we could get in front of most people. I knew a lot of angels specifically. We actually had a bunch of angels committed right up front that were just people we’d – all the founders of companies I’ve worked at before invested previous bosses, a ton of people I just worked with at previous startups before all invested.

Part of getting those folks involved too, as we were talking to them and I was in the middle of writing this memo, building this deck, we were getting feedback on the pitch. We were really getting the narrative down and figuring out what questions were coming up a lot. Also too, as those people were coming together up is also mapping out who I could get introduced to. Then I also just built a massive list. I have an error table. I can even screen share it.

Pablo Srugo: 10:40

While you’re pulling it up, let me ask this. When you decided to do this fundraise, what percent of your time was dedicated to this, like 10%, 50%, 90%?

Andrew: 10:48

This is 80%, 90% for me. Once we were going hard, it was 90%. Then in the weeks where we were getting prepped, it was probably 60%, 70%. Then it shifted to about 90% until it was over.

Pablo Srugo: 10:58

The top priority almost – 

Andrew: 11:00

For me. My co-founder was probably 10% to 15 % of his priorities. It was the two of us. He was building and I was out here raising when that happened.

Pablo Srugo: 11:10

Walk me through each of those steps, first of all, the names. There’s the people you know, that’s the easy part, but the ones that you don’t know, where do you get that list?

Andrew: 11:18

Literally, there’s so many Google Sheets on the internet. I can’t even keep track of them, but there’s a ton of lists on the internet of just investors. It’s not hard to find investor lists to be, in my opinion. I found a few for people I trusted, and then just had that list. Then I filtered it for who I thought would invest it, pre-seed, seed, and then who – maybe a little bit of focus on finding people that were specifically investing in our market. Then after that, we literally went to all the people we knew. Then to some extent, did it ourselves and just mapped out who could introduce us to who, and we mapped – 

Pablo Srugo: 11:48

You’re just asking. You’re just sharing this air to people – 

Andrew: 11:50

I’m texting people like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m texting like, hey, how good is your intro to this person? You know them. Could you intro? Then I would do the other thing and be like, is there someone that we don’t have in here that we should have in here? We kind of mapped that. Then honestly, as you’re raising, you’re continually doing this. Every single time – 

Pablo Srugo: 12:08

How far did you get on this before pressing go? You’re doing your meetings with people you already knew, but the new people – 

Andrew: 12:14

Yeah. Sometimes I didn’t start with people I knew. Depending on how I knew them. I’m out of weighted if I really wanted them to invest. I have this. You get this big list. At the same time, you’re getting your story together and you’re getting your materials together. Then there was a point where we had mapped out this pretty well. We had a big list. It’s never fully done, but it was good enough.

Pablo Srugo: 12:34

What was it like, 200 names?

Andrew: 12:35

It was a hundred. We had hundreds in there. It was at least 200, 300 names. There are so many funds doing pre-seed seed. There’s a ton of investors on there. We had the people we cared about that we knew we cared about, then just a bunch of other names that we – maybe we’re like – they’re an investor at pre-seed seed. Then we started doing – I characterize as the practice round, which is friendlies that you trust to give you good feedback, angels, other pounders, whatever. Then honestly, talking to investors, like you’re not going to be disappointed if they don’t invest because for what – I don’t know. You’re probably not pitching Sequoia as your very first.

Pablo Srugo: 13:10

Now, just question, with those friendlies, did you set it up as like, hey, I’m raising, let’s have a call? Or did you set it up as like, I’m going to raise, would love some feedback? How did you structure that?

Andrew: 13:20

It’s very person by person. Some cases, if someone I know really, really well, I might text them, email them, whatever, and just be like, hey, I’m getting prepped for the raise. We’d love to get your thoughts on this. Then other cases, they might have already even committed. Whatever you’re doing, I’m just going to invest in. Just tell me. I’d be like, hey, you can invest in the REV link here by – I’d love to get your feedback on the pitch itself. Then we just schedule a call and make it happen.

Pablo Srugo: 13:46

Do you find that’s a bit different? There are pros and cons, because when I’m looking at somebody and they’re pitching me, I’m straight up in, am I going to invest or not mode? When somebody’s like, hey, I’d love your advice. Now, I’m in this help mode and – I don’t know which one’s actually better. I don’t know where my mind is good at all. It changes definitely the way I perceive it. I don’t know how you played that.

Andrew: 14:04

I think that does really depend. It just really depends on your relationship with the person and how much you’ve been engaging with them. Most of the people we were going to for advice were people I talked to on a regular basis already. We already had that relationship. I don’t think anybody who I didn’t think was a guarantee to invest. I probably wouldn’t have gone to – I wouldn’t have just straight up asked them to invest. I would have either try to pitch them on investing, or I would have maybe talked to them and gotten advice first depending. I wouldn’t have just been, do you want to invest or not?

I think it is important to be thoughtful about that. I actually also think there are two approaches to fundraising. There’s the finesse approach where you try to almost get yourself preempted and kick off a process that way. This is one of those things that I don’t think people openly talk about a lot, but I think you can finesse the game a little bit. Some people do this really well. It’s not what I did. But if you got an offer to join Y Combinator tomorrow and you went out and shopped that, I guarantee you, you could probably get a fund to throw it on a term sheet and try to do your round.

That stuff happens. People don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to act like it’s real. Founders that pull it off often are not sharing this, but a bunch of people will do things like that. It’s the same reason why you get that first term sheet. Now, the leverage is in your court and you can go talk to multiple different investors. That’s one approach, and the other approach is just build your materials, you get your story, you build your list, and then you just start getting introduced to investors and run a process until you have a term sheet.

Both can work, but one is a little bit more – you’re not raising, but you’re talking to people and having conversations and hoping that there’s some trigger that then you can turn on a process. I think usually when people talk about that happening, they act like it was truly – 

Pablo Srugo: 15:45

Serendipity. I actually saw – 

Andrew: 15:46

I know a ton of founders. They very intentionally, they know exactly what they’re doing.

Pablo Srugo: 15:50

It’s a game, like anything else. I think everybody that’s party to it understands it. But yeah, I think there are different approaches to it.

Andrew: 15:56

It was never my style. That’s why we didn’t do it that way.

Pablo Srugo: 15:59

Let me ask you this, on the actual amount, you said you’re raising 1.5. How did you get that number and you ended up raising almost twice that. Was that planned out like you wanted to oversubscribe?

Andrew: 16:09

Yes and yes. When you go raise, you have your good. Maybe worst case, middle case, and best case scenario for what you can raise. We had that planned out of like, hey, if we don’t succeed in this raise, what does that look like? Or if we only get some of it, what does that look like? We had a version of that that planned out, just a basic financial model for how much runway that could get us, and who we could hire, and how we could basically go build product and go to market. Then we had the middle case, which is the 1.5 where we were going to raise, we were hoping to raise.

Then we had a case for if we were able to raise more money, what could we do with that instead? Honestly, frankly, I think we did want to raise more. The reason we didn’t go off for that number though is honestly it’s easier to oversubscribe than it is to not get to the initial number you want. Say you want to raise 2. It’s easier to get to 1.5 and then go up to 2 than it is to say you’re raising 2, because if you try to get to 2, but then you’re stuck on 1.4, it’s psychology.

Pablo Srugo: 17:16

A hundred percent. It’s a momentum game. I’ve shared this before. I’ll share it with you, but we did this. You did it strategically. When I started off and I was the first time founder, I did this by complete accident where we literally were so naive. This is decades ago. There’s less things or whatever, but my co-founder and I were like, dude, I think we just need a quarter million dollars. We go out. We start raising a quarter million. Then as we start moving, we’re like, you know what, actually, I think we need half a million. We move it up to half a million, and then a million. Then we ended up getting – I think it was like 1.5 or 2 at the end of it.

It ended up helping, because this momentum was like, we’re always almost there. The next investors, especially in the angel side, is like, okay, you’re 80 % to your goal. Yeah, I probably need to make a decision. When you need to raise 2 million and you’re talking to somebody for 100K check, 50K check, a fund is different. But on the angel side, they’re like, call me when you’re almost there. You know what I mean? Everybody wants to be the last money and not the first.

Andrew: 18:12

Yeah, and I’d say for most angels, it probably is just best to wait for them until – I think it depends on why you’re talking to angels. But if you’re looking for angels as more for – I think angels are some of the most helpful investors to have on your cap table. But a lot of times, the best time to go after them is after you’ve got the momentum and are oversubscribed or whatever. But even if you’re talking to investors like that, some fund that writes, I don’t know, 150K, 250K checks, they won’t lead you around.

You’ll get lots of these like, yeah, we’re interested in – they’ll just sit there waiting to make a decision to see what’s going to happen. Or they’ll commit on the condition that you get some lead, some term sheet. The whole thing is just a momentum.

Pablo Srugo: 18:51

Investors have perfected the art of sitting on that fence. You know what I mean?

Andrew: 18:54

Yeah, sure, and it’s in their incentive. It’s in their incentive, and that’s fine. It’s part of the game. You’ve got the people that are going to push you over. Everything to me is getting to that point where you have the momentum and you have the leverage to then be able to – because it’s also too – once you get to that point, it’s also easier to choose. Because if things go well, you want to choose, what investors do I actually want to work with, not just who will give me money? The more people you talk to, and the more momentum you get, the higher the likelihood is that you’re going to get the round done that you want and get it done with people you really want to work with.

Pablo Srugo: 19:27

You’ve got this list. You’ve got people that are going to make those intros. Let me ask you about that. What percent of your outreach was warm intros and what percent was cold?

Andrew: 19:39

I got asked that a lot. I was almost exclusively – I don’t think I sent a single. I’ve sent a lot of cold emails in my time, but not for this fundraise. I think almost everything was a warm intro or someone we already knew. The reason for that is just like, I think – 

Pablo Srugo: 19:52

It’s just like hard mode. Most investors don’t want to – 

Andrew: 19:56

They get so much inbound and it’s very rare to get something that cuts through the noise that’s called outbound and just – they trust – it’s always better for you to come in through a warm intro, all other things, even being email, even if it was the world’s best cold email. It’s just a better strategy if you can pull it off. I have a separate thing I wrote on Twitter about just how we got to the point where we could get introduced to so many different people. Because that’s the number one thing people asked about is like, how do you get – 

It’s actually not hard to get introduced to people if you have a way to get a droid. But actually, the hard thing is not asking someone to introduce people to me. That’s relatively mechanistic. It’s like, hey, do you know this person? Will you put this blurb in front of them, and then, boom? The hard thing is being in a position where you know people that will put that email in front of them and will say good things about you when they do. That took years of just working really hard and building relationships for me to get to that point. I was not there five, six years ago, honestly even three years ago, four years ago.

Now, my co-founder and I are there today. Some of this stuff is just things, putting yourself in a position to eventually do this with your career. If you’ve not worked in tech enough and have some existing relationships, getting that many warm intros is probably harder. Then I think your best option is to find a super connector, get them to believe in you, and then you back your way into getting introduced to people that way. But the core point is I think it’s very hard to raise money and to get enough meetings, especially in a condensed timeline, if you don’t have a way to get introduced to people.

Pablo Srugo: 21:21

In most cases, for you, not only was it warm intros, it was warm intros from people that you already knew. It’s not like you had some mechanism where you sought out a way to get intros as part of this process.

Andrew: 21:33

I did not know. I wasn’t an accelerator or anything like that. It was people I knew and they were pretty much always people – I think they’re probably 20, 30 people that introduced us to a bunch of different investors. It’s definitely spiky. There’s people that offer and then don’t follow up, and then there’ll be one person that just introduces you to 30 people.

Pablo Srugo: 21:51

Okay, so you’re ready to press go. How do you do it? Do you do all 200? Do you batch it? Then how do you schedule these so they’re all condensed?

Andrew: 21:58

Yeah. We did batch it. We started slowly. We had the friendlies that we did maybe 10 to 15 – probably not quite 15, but we did several conversations with investors that we didn’t care that much if they invest or not. It’s great. In some cases, we met some people that were like, wow, we actually did really like these people. We were mostly trying to figure out what was wrong with the story. Then once we felt like we – okay, this is – 

Pablo Srugo: 22:23

Walk me through that. How do you make sure you actually get feedback so that you can hone that pitch, so you can figure out – how do you do that? You use those conversations to make sure you actually got the narrative right. What are you doing?

Andrew: 22:36

I think you’re just looking at what the questions are people are asking you. There’s usually people are passing for a reason, assuming they’re passing or just ghosting you. Whatever questions they’re asking you during the pitch is probably the reason why they’re passing. You can read into it even if they don’t tell you. That’s why they’re passing. If they’re asking you about competition, if they’re like, what’s the why now? Why hasn’t this existed before? Why wouldn’t Stripe or Google or whoever do this?

You can probably back your way into what it is that they’re seeing. Then hopefully, you can pair whatever you’re hearing in your meetings with other people you trust, like another founder that’s raised before, for instance, and be like, I keep hearing this. You can probably extrapolate to exactly why people are doubting what it is you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a perfect answer, you can at least figure out like, what do I believe about this? Hopefully you address it earlier in your pitch.

Then on the other things, even if it’s something that – I don’t know, you can’t address everything. You at least have an answer that you have conviction in. Because sometimes you will just get asked about something and you’re like, actually, I hadn’t thought about that before. Or maybe you’ve thought about it, but you didn’t have a very high conviction, ready-made answer. After 10 to 15 meetings though, you probably heard everything people are going to ask you.

Pablo Srugo: 23:53

Did you write this stuff down after each meeting or you just remember whatever stuff?

Andrew: 23:57

I had a thing that would transcribe notes, but for the most part, I just took notes during the meeting, right after the meeting. Then you sit down at the end of the day and you think through and it’s like all through, okay, this – since writing’s big for me, I would go into my memo. Basically, anything I was getting asked about and struggling with, there was a section in my memo where I wrote out exactly what I thought about it. If you can write about it, you can probably talk about it on a pitch meeting.

Pablo Srugo: 24:21

Then did you go in that slides, maybe to the appendix so you can flip to it when somebody asks a question and said ready?

Andrew: 24:26

This is another thing. I barely use my deck when pitching. I would send it to people as an advance of what they could read through, but I didn’t have an appendix. Most of the additional material stuff, I just pushed that to the memo. Anything in the deck was mostly for them to read beforehand. Every once in a while, I would pull up a slide to emphasize a point I was making when we were talking. I never wanted this to be like, here’s Slide 1 and here’s my problem.

Pablo Srugo: 24:51

Your conversations, these are probably, what, 30-minute meetings, probably on Zoom and you’re just talking, no slides?

Andrew: 24:56

Yeah, talking, no slides. My process was I would usually start out. Most investors are really – this is another thing that I think you have to work on tactically – I had to work on is that you’re doing your meetings. Investors are really good at taking control of the meeting. They do this way more than you. I think it is in your interest to flip that paradigm and be – you’re not trying to be an asshole, but you want to be in control of the meeting and rake running with your own agenda.

A lot of times, people jump in and try to give their intro and then very quickly flip it to you so they can just grow you with questions. I’m even fine if they do that. Honestly, their intro will get out things that I was going to ask them about anyway. But as soon as they’re done introducing themselves, I’m trying to ask them questions about, okay, do you invest – say you’re raising a pre-seed or you’re roughly at a pre-seed stage. The labels get weird. But just try to literally ask, do you invest in pre-seed seed? What’s really your sweet spot?

Then based on what someone tells you, you might literally hear, this person is like – they like to invest in things that has 100K in ARR. We are not there yet. It’s like, we’re automatically out. You can literally say, hey, actually, we can talk and get to know each other and stuff. But I don’t think we’re going to be at BFF for you guys right now because this is where we’re at.

Pablo Srugo: 26:06

You’re qualifying them.

Andrew: 26:07

Yeah, you want to qualify them, and you also want to just get data out on what are they actually – because also you’re going to hear something – you can ask about what founders they like, what have they invested in recently. I usually had two to three that I cared about for each investor. When you ask those questions, you can at the minimum figure out, is this maybe a fit? Then two, you can figure out what you should maybe double click on. If you heard them mention that they really, really, really care about – I don’t know, some technological shift in what’s possible with technology and what they’re investing in, you can probably emphasize that in your pitch, assuming it’s true.

There are different elements of the pitch that are going to resonate with different people. If you ask these qualifying questions, you’re picking up on what someone cares about at least a little bit. Then that can direct what you talk about. Then the last thing actually on this point with qualifying questions, I forgot about this. I would usually ask them. My last question every time is, so we’re building in the tax compliance space. It’s very unsexy and most people – you’ve either dealt with it and maybe know something about it or you’ve never even thought about it.

A lot of investors have never thought about it before. We would ask every single person, how much do you know about this on a scale of 1 to 10? I would say something like 1 being I’ve never thought about this before in my life, and 10 being like I’ve dealt with this problem. I know it this early and I know everything about all the products in the space. Usually, people would call it – that was actually really good because I would tailor how much time I need to spend explaining that to them what this even is before I get into why it’s a good product business, whatever. It’s really helpful information for you to make sure you’re connecting with someone and having a good conversation. Then I would usually go into basically introducing what it was we were building, and I would explain the market.

Pablo Srugo: 27:44

We’ll go into the rest of it. I just want to say just one thing, because you’re giving the founder side. I want to compliment with the BC side. I will tell you that what you’re talking about doing all that pre-qualification happens maybe 5% of the time. I think what you’re doing, there’s a few things. Number one is the reality is you’re setting yourself apart because if you’re doing something that only happens 5% of the time, it was a bad thing. Then right off, you’re going to stand out. The number two thing is you talked about this is you’re actually using that information live in that pitch. Your pitch just got better.

The third thing though, and I see this and I notice it, and I’m almost looking for it is, by changing it up and qualifying them, you are putting them on their heels, and the dynamic changes right off the bat. It’s interesting when I’m put in this position. All of a sudden, you feel like shit, because the reality is in most cases, whoever has the money has the power. This goes for VCs to the LPs and it goes from VCs to founders and it just goes down that chain. That’s just how it is.

Most of the time, we see a lot more founders than founders see VCs. When you flip that, and all of a sudden, I feel like I don’t really have the power anymore, it just puts me in a different mind frame, but also, I’m actually partially investing. I know that a venture-backed company is going to have to raise, and then raise, and then raise. That’s just the reality of it. It’s a legitimate skill. It’s not just the fact that the dynamic changes. It’s that all of a sudden I notice, okay, this was really good at fundraising. That’s a skill set. That’s an important skill set for a CEO to have because they’re not going to be a profitable business soon. Anyways, that’s just everything that’s happening in my head when someone does what you’re saying you do.

Andrew: 29:21

No, I actually think that’s a great point because I think most founders don’t really get to see into what an investor is thinking. One of our angels, he’s a serial founder. His name is Siqi Chen. He’s the founder of a company called Runway. He has this thing he says of, you have to get into the mindset when you’re in fundraising that investors are trying to sell you, an investor, because they’re selling the most commoditized product in the world, the US dollar.

I think you can take that too far. He can do that because I think he still does this thoughtfully, but you do need to get into the mindset where like – especially like, man, I come from Dirt Poor, Ohio. I would never have dreamed 10, 12 years ago that I would be doing this with my life. When you come from a place like that, it is a weird thing to go raise money. I do think you should have respect for people are investing real capital. You shouldn’t treat it like a game. It is serious.

But at the end of the day, it is helpful to shift your mindset into realizing, actually, there’s a lot of money out there, and that changes more into – it’s all a psychological game, but I do think if you flip that switch in your mind, it makes it easier for you to just walk in and be confident and not be playing scared, because an investor’s going to feel that too. Even if they’re not going to say it, they’re going to feel like, oh, this person – they don’t feel like they deserve my money. I don’t think anybody wants to invest behind someone who acts that way, because to your point, you’re going to have to fundraise again, most likely. If you don’t think that person can raise money for the business, then it’s hard to have conviction behind that investment.

Pablo Srugo: 30:46

Anyways, I interrupted you. We’re going to go to the rest. That’s how you started off. That’s first five minutes or so. Then the rest, you tell the story and you hone it depending on what you heard.

Andrew: 30:55

Depending on the person, it could be as little as three, as much as maybe seven minutes of walking them through the business itself. My goal there, I’m not really flipping through my slides. I might pull up a slide or two here if it’s relevant to introduce a point. Mostly, I’m just trying to like get them to the point where they understand. I think the basic structure was understand what this problem space even is because it’s not something most people have dealt with.

Then you’ve got them there, and then you bring them into the history. I actually think there’s different types of stories you can tell. You can tell a story of your market. You can tell a story of a technology and a white owl. You can tell your personal story. I would usually do a mix of telling my personal story, explaining to them this problem space, and then walking them through this big moment in time in this market that we’re in and why this is really interesting moment in time.

I know that would all dovetail into where we’re at today. We’re including talking about our fundraise, like how much we were raising, stuff like that. That just went naturally until it was relatively short. You usually had at least 10 to 15 minutes to talk. Hopefully, you didn’t always go well right, but most of the time, people understood what you were doing. Then you can have a dialogue about the questions that they have, and hopefully, just like a back and forth conversation about the business, about what you’re trying to do. Then hopefully, you get to the end of the call and there’s either – it’s clearly that this person’s into this. There’s some clear next step and you move forward in the process.

Pablo Srugo: 32:21

Do you try to ask them what their timeline is with their processes, things like that?

Andrew: 32:24

I usually ask that at the beginning of the call. If I didn’t though, I’ll ask it at the end and be like, hey, what’s – I know we’re getting a time. What’s your typical process from here? If I know it’s a bigger fund, how many different – maybe one good thing at a picker fund is to figure out how many different people have to be involved to make a decision.

If you’re talking to an associate, it’s probably obvious that they probably can’t write the checks. It’s like there’s going to be another piece of the process versus if you’re talking to a solo GP, it’s like they’re the decision-maker so they might be able to move quicker. Either way, everyone’s got their own style, so flushing that out is going to be good. Then ideally, some commitment on what next steps look like, that way you can action against that. If it ends very vaguely, it’s hard to follow up on that. Also too, the investor’s probably not interested, because when they’re interested, there’s usually next steps.

Pablo Srugo: 33:13

I got a few different questions. One is you mentioned associates there. Did you specifically try and always talk to a partner? Did you find there was a difference, better or worse, if you were talking to an associate versus a VP, principal, partner, whatever?

Andrew: 33:27

Yeah. I’m not hardcore on this. Some people only ever talk to partners. I think all other things being able, it usually probably is better to only talk to partners. I think there are a lot of associates and principals and whatever that either can do a deal or at least are very influential and are a part of getting somewhere. At the end of the day, if your only intro to a firm you’re interested in is through an associate, then you’re going to take your way in the door.

I think if we had a way into a partner, we would do that. If our best way in was through an associate or principal, or I just knew this person and I liked them really well, if I could have gotten introduced to a partner at a fund but I knew one of the associates there really well, I’m actually going to talk to the associate first because we have a re-existing relationship. I think it is a little bit case by case, but sure, if you can, talk to a partner.

Pablo Srugo: 34:14

Did you have either a target dilution, target price, and also target close date, you use any of those things?

Andrew: 34:23

I didn’t do an exact target close day. Ideally, you want to raise about this, and we want to not give up more of the company than this. We can flex here. I had a range. I didn’t have an exact number. I had exact number for how much we wanted to raise. I did not have an exact number for dilution. I had more of a range where we wanted to see. I did not necessarily have an exact price. Although once we had a lead, then we had a price.

Pablo Srugo: 34:54

On a closed day.

Andrew: 34:56

Then the closed day, I generally would just tell people – I’d be like, ideally, sooner than later, but I would say, I’d like to have this wrapped up by – I think we were raising going towards the holiday. Ideally by Thanksgiving, we have this wrapped up. That’s what I would say. There was a little bit of risk in even putting a specific date on it, but you need some date or else it looks super open-ended. What I tried to avoid is saying November 18th, because if it doesn’t close at November 18th, you lose credibility.

Pablo Srugo: 35:23

I’ve heard that advice given, and I just don’t get who would ever do that. I think if you get back into a corner like you did, yeah, saying like – and ideally is a key word. We hope to ideally we close by this day. Okay, that’s normal. Obviously, you probably have some ambition to close by some point sooner or later, things like that. But when people come in and they’re like, yeah, our plan, we’re going to close four weeks from now. I’m like, dude, you have no idea when you go. You can’t know ahead of time unless you have a lead when you’re going to close. What’s the point?

Andrew: 35:48

Yeah. To your point, most investors could tell, unless you’re truly in a spot where that is true, and it’s usually obvious when that is true, investors are going to know. I think trying to understand where investors are coming from and how they see you is important, because I knew the investors were going to know that. Also, investors do this more than I do. I’m just not good at playing the game and bullshitting people. I actually do think like a lot of founders will try to finesse things a lot. I have a couple of friends who are really good at this. More power to them.

I am bad at it. It is not who I am as a person. If you’re just honest with people, it was true. I wanted to wrap around up by around Thanksgiving. We were running a process. We were talking to people. I was always honest with people about that. The goal was to close it. Even when we hit a point where we were actually oversubscribed and we were in the middle of – we’re going to close this week, it was true. I’ve been honest with people the whole time. No one ever questioned me like I was lying to them and playing a game. I was honest.

Honestly, if you’re in doubt, don’t try to game it, just be honest, because I think there’s a lot of advice on Twitter and stuff like that of these more finessing styles. Honestly, for most people, just be honest, run a process, try to build – just do the basics really, really well, I think. Sure, there are investors that like to be able to try to play the game, but I think – the investors I want to work with at least appreciated that I was always dead honest with them, because that’s also, too, how I want to work with them going forward. Ideally, you’re going to work with these people for a long time if things work out.

Pablo Srugo: 37:11

What about the amount though? You mentioned you went out to raise 1.5. You knew in your case you had a worst middle and a best case. Did you share that with anybody before you got a lead?

Andrew: 37:22

That’s a good question. I didn’t share the ranges. I shared that we were trying to raise that middle case number. I did think it would be nice to raise more here. My thinking was literally like, okay, this market is tough. Raising the larger amount, I got some feedback on it and they’re like, that’s a big precede. I had a reason for why I wanted it. It’s like we’re in a really complex market. I have no idea where the macro is going. I think there are good reasons to raise more now, but I was like, okay, I think I can at least have a shot at what we need to do with this much. It may not be my ideal case, but we can do it. This is what I’m going to go out and try to raise, and this is a palpable pre-seed. Then we’ll just see what happens.

It was from that perspective. Then people would ask me though, especially as we started to have momentum and we were looking like we were going to get it done. People would ask like, would you raise more? What I would always tell people is if we oversubscribe, we would consider raising a little bit more, somewhere in this range. But right now, we’re just focused on getting this as close and we’ll see what happens.

Pablo Srugo: 38:21

Yeah, because I’ve seen the other side. People come in, they’re like, I’m raising one and a half, but if possible, we could also raise three and you’re like, which one of these dilutes?

Andrew: 38:30

You’re raising one and a half – 

Pablo Srugo: 38:32

It just dilutes. It goes back to everything we were talking about, that confidence, always with respect, but I think shifting the dynamics, putting them on your heels, having that confidence. All that speaks to you saying, this is what I want to do, and this is how I’m going to do it. Then yeah, sure, things might change later. But going in already with two or three different plans is just soft.

Andrew: 38:53

Yeah, I can agree more.

Pablo Srugo: 38:54

How long the whole prostate? You planned in September. You went out in October, and you close by end of November. Is that about right?

Andrew: 39:01

I wouldn’t even say we went on in September. I would say we started getting prepped in September. It is real work. I think we actually started raising for real, and probably early to mid-October is when we started this practice run. Then we really accelerated, laid out around October 20th, I think, is when we hit the gas and we’re like, okay, we’re going to go from maybe doing five or six meetings a week to talking to as many people as possible.

Pablo Srugo: 39:24

How many were you doing? In a day, how many – 

Andrew: 39:27

I think it started from – I might do five or six or seven in a week, including friendlies to – by the middle, it was maybe I would do four or five a day. By the end, I was doing a dozen plus a day.

Pablo Srugo: 39:40

How do you keep the energy up? On the one hand, you’re perfecting it because you’re just doing the same thing over and over. But how do you keep that energy up, on that fifth meeting, on that day?

Andrew: 39:48

Yeah. It is hard and you’re definitely going to – some are good. You’re going to have more energy for the night. The honest answer is I try to get – I just knew what I would cut on. I tried really hard to get enough sleep. Otherwise, just know that it’s for a time and you do have to gut it out. A weird one is I didn’t eat. I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat lunch. I would literally basically not eat till nine o ‘clock at night, until I was done with the day.

Pablo Srugo: 40:11

Would that help you?

Andrew: 40:13

Yeah, it did. It’s weird. I drank a lot of coffee, but it’s like something about just not having food. You’re just in a pure adrenaline mode.

Pablo Srugo: 40:21

It’s over 40. I suggest not doing that.

Andrew: 40:24

Maybe don’t do that, but it works for me. It works for me.

Pablo Srugo: 40:27

That’s good, man. Then how did you time it? The other thing that sometimes goes wrong is you get these intros and people like, okay, cool. Yeah, let’s talk in two weeks. I was like, let’s talk tomorrow. How did you try and did you do a lot of work to just compress, especially those first meetings or not really?

Andrew: 40:40

This practice room was almost its own thing. I really wasn’t trying to hit a ton of calendar density and Bob’s getting it down. Once we were like, okay, we’re just taking as many meetings as possible. I would go to my CRM and figure out like, okay, I can get interest to these people. Okay, let’s go through. But I’ve got a Tier 2 by how much I wanted to talk to them, and I would just go through and try to get introductions.

Then if my calendar looks pretty stacked and clear, I would probably put less effort for a couple of days into doing that and more effort in just doing meetings. Then I would be like, okay, next week, Monday is packed, but Tuesday through Friday is not that much. I’m like, a week, we can have out from that. As you go, you’re continually filling it up and keeping it full. Yeah, you’ve got the people – if someone’s like, I can’t talk for three weeks, it’s like, okay, you schedule it, and then you just – it’s almost like not even a factor.

I had that happen. There were people that didn’t schedule us until December. Then I just email all of them. I’m like, yeah, the rounds done. But yeah, it’s fine, schedule it. Honestly, there was no – I didn’t even use a calendar link. I literally just meticulously tried to stack it as much as possible and just keep getting introductions. Then you can look at your calendar and know when you’re like, okay, this is pretty full. I’m going to try to push through. I’m going to try to hold.

Also, you can feel it too. Most people are telling you roughly when they’re available. If you get introduced to an investor on a Thursday, they’re probably not going to be able to talk on Friday every once in a while, but most of them are usually booked up. Usually, you’ve got a week, week and a half wee time. As long as you’re a week to a week and a half pretty stacked, you can run it on that.

Pablo Srugo: 42:13

What did you find was the standard process for a pre-seed like first call, and then partner meeting, or how many calls to a decision?

Andrew: 42:21

I think it’s all over the place depending on the fund. A big fund, you could have a whole process, or a fund just has a lot of partners. Also too, they might need to get to consensus where some, it only takes one person to get it through. It really does depend. Some people we had five, six meetings, or it was just really structured. You’d have a meeting. You’d have a second meeting with the same person, and then you’d go to them and another partner, and then you’d do full partner meeting.

Then other people, it was very – they had a much less structured process and they’d be like, okay, I want to dig into this. I’ll get back to you. Or somebody might have wanted to talk to one of your design partners. I found that most people at that stage was relatively all over the place. Probably the main commonality is if there’s more than one person involved after the first call, they’re going to want you to pretty quickly meet the rest of people.

Then for me, specifically, since it was me and my co-founder, I did all the first calls. They had not met him yet. Normally, after the second meeting, I would bring him in and they would want to meet him and see that I like – obviously this other person was real and that they wanted to get to know my co-founder, my CTO, and see him. But I tried to keep him out of the first couple meetings of the process, mostly just because it was more efficient for his time. I think most of us are sure respected. Ideally not both founders are fundraising.

Pablo Srugo: 43:38

I think for the first call, yeah, that makes total sense. Were you ultimately able to get multiple term sheets, or how did that play out?

Andrew: 43:44

Pre-seed is weird too, where it’s like term sheets are this weird in between thing. We basically had an initial lead, and then we almost ended up pulling in a different lead, because we had somebody doing 600, it was more or less leading a 1.5 round. Then we had somebody else come in and basically want to do even more. Then they almost reset terms, but the existing investors were fine with that.

It was one of those things where it just worked out that way. We basically had a bunch of people that wanted to invest. We, I think, ended up – we had about 10 million in commits on about – what was supposed to be 1.5 round. Basically going into Thanksgiving, we really, really oversubscribed. We did references on everyone we were considering taking money from. We negotiated a little bit on terms, which just got to a place where we felt – 

Pablo Srugo: 44:35

I was going to ask, especially on terms, what were your big things? Valuation, I assume, was the top thing you negotiated or was it others?

Andrew: 44:41

I didn’t negotiate it that hard. We did negotiate valuation. We ended up going up a little bit from where we were originally at. I actually had better offers for valuation though than what we went with, but I wanted to work with the people we picked.

Pablo Srugo: 44:53

What was that? People say that sometimes, I need to go for the highest price. Was that because of the vibe or was that because of hard referrals from people who had worked with that person and you just knew they were going to be value-added? How did you think through it?

Andrew: 45:05

It was a little bit of both. There were two different scenarios I saw. One was just we didn’t talk to a lot of multi-stage funds. But when we did, it was later in the process. Generally, I’m just really skeptical of funds that are doing pre-seed through a series each acts like – nothing against them. I hope we work with them eventually. But at that stage, a million dollar check to a multi-billion dollar fund as a call option. Even if you really liked the partner there, it creates all kinds of signaling risk for the future.

Pablo Srugo: 45:34

A hundred percent.

Andrew: 45:35

It is a founder. I was really skeptical of those folks. That was why it wasn’t that I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to take money at that stage from a fund like that. Then others, it was because at this point where we did oversubscribe and we went from just being another company fundraising to being a relatively hot round. I was really skeptical when someone who had just met me was trying to offer me all of this money so fast with very little diligence. It mostly felt like a lot of their interest was coming from the fact that other people wanted to invest. Therefore, they wanted to invest. Again, we’re going to work with these people for a long time, and I want to trust. I want to understand how they think, how they make decisions, and what they are to work with.

Pablo Srugo: 46:18

I just need to know that. Did you actually appreciate it? Because in many cases, founders, they love a quick decision, but you’re saying you actually appreciated the diligence and the work – 

Andrew: 46:26

I love a quick decision, but I want to understand the conviction behind it. It’s like, if someone looked just like – I actually had an investor. One of our investors did make a really, really fast decision, but I understood their conviction. They’re very people-driven investors and they invested in a friend of mine’s company as well. I had some contacts from him and he just made it really clear to me like, hey, this is how we think. We have so much conviction and you and your co-founder. Honestly, that’s our process. I understood it for them where someone else, it was like – these guys just like crammed their way into meeting us because they heard about us. I almost found out we were oversubscribed. You could just feel the energy because they don’t want to miss this deal.

Pablo Srugo: 47:02

Yeah, wanting deals kind of thing.

Andrew: 47:05

We had others that the firm that ended up coming in led our round. They moved pretty quickly and saw that we were hitting urgency, but they did a – one interesting advantage we had is that going into Thanksgiving. We had 800 committed on 1.5, and then we were at 1.1 the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Then Friday, we hit 1.8 or something like that. There’s three days before Thanksgiving. Then by end of Wednesday, we were at 5 on what was supposed to be 1.5, and you could try and invest.

Because of that, everyone we were in diligence with though, they were doing the work and they did the work to make a decision on whether they want to do it best or not by Thanksgiving. When that spread and all these people were trying to claw in and the next week and a half before we closed, it was very obvious. All of these people, even if over the last two or three weeks they had moved fast, it may have been two weeks to a decision, but they did references. They talked to my co-founder. They met customers. We spent a lot of time together.

Versus somebody else is coming in and they’re like, they’ve met me once. They’ve talked to nobody else. They don’t even know my market that well. It was clear from our conversation that they’re trying to offer me a million dollars. I personally just didn’t trust that conviction. Whereas I trusted – this person may have made a decision in two weeks, but I know they did the work, and I know why they want to do this. Then of course, on every investor, we did references. We talked to founders that they had worked with before and made sure that what we thought of them checked out.

Pablo Srugo: 48:30

What was your max? Because you had all this money, you could have taken – what was your max kind of like? Was it dilution, like you didn’t want to do maybe 120% on a pre-seed? Was that part of the thinking?

Andrew: 48:40

Yeah, we definitely took on more dilution than a lot of companies at our stage would have taken. We basically raised something of a seed-sized pre-seed. We could have taken a little bit less dilution, but I think it was mostly like we knew about how much money we wanted to have and what it would buy us. There were reasons to do that. Mostly just around that we don’t know where the macro is going. Then two, this was a really complicated space and having the flexibility to hire an extra engineer, have a few more months to get the traction we wanted was a positive to us. We could basically play even more to win versus having to be really on a tight rope.

Then the other thing was I think we actually took on more money than we needed a little bit because we had a fund that we really liked that we really wanted to work with. They had a very clear ownership threshold they wanted to hit, and so we took on a little bit of extra dilution because we were excited about working with that fund. That was most of it. Then I think with startups and dilution, obviously you care about dilution as a founder, but one, I’m more or less a first-time founder, my co -founder is too.

To some extent, you’re not going to get the terms that Parker Conrad is going to get if he goes and starts a new company. Then two, even if and when you do get pretty good terms, it’s either going to work or it’s not. I think you’re most optimizing for how do you get the best chances of a successful company, not like, oh, did I – one or two extra points of dilution pales in comparison to, did this thing work or did it fail?

Pablo Srugo: 50:03

Awesome, man. This is great. Tons of tons of tactical details. Any last words, any last pieces of advice, especially since – because you put this stuff out, I’m sure you spoke to a lot of – I mean, you spoke to a lot of founders to get advice. You’ve had a lot of founders seek out advice from you.

Andrew: 50:18

Not much. I don’t know. Honestly, control what you can control. Do the work. A lot of things just come down to keeping it really, really simple. Then I do think, anything we’ve not talked about here is just, you can get another founder that’s done relatively recently the thing you’re trying to do and just be on a texting basis with them. That’s the most helpful thing you probably could do to doing sales, recruiting, fundraising. I think that was really helpful to me. Yeah, if anybody has questions, I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter. You can shoot me a note there and I will do the best I can to help if I can. A lot of folks have done the same for me.

Pablo Srugo: 50:51

Andrew, thank you so much, man. It’s been a great episode.

Andrew: 50:54

Cool, man. Thank you for having me.

Pablo Srugo: 50:57

If you listened to this episode and the show, and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. It’s actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. But whichever app you’re listening to this episode on, take it out, go to a product market fit show and leave a review, please. It’s going to help. It’s not just going to help me to be clear. It’s going to help other founders discover the show because the algorithms, whether it’s Spotify, whether it’s Apple, whether it’s any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It’s quantity of reviews.

The reality is if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute, even if you’re just writing great podcast, or I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously, the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything. Leave five stars and you will be helping me. But most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.