Caterpillar Cowboy

Here’s what I’ll tell you:

- AL is for finishing your round. Don’t bother until you have 25-50% of your raise already committed. Since you shouldn’t raise less than $500k*, $200k should be minimum. Except in rare cases, you should also be launched with meaningful # of users or customers. My rule of thumb is 1000 users or 100 customers but that can vary.

- AL is an exercise in social proof, so get the biggest names you can committed before driving a lot of attention.

- Use AL’s search tools to find investors you want to target and get warm intros through their portfolio companies.

- Make sure your product description paragraph clearly and concisely says what you do. This is your elevator pitch.

- Your traction section should be in bullet point form filled with data: users, transactions, revenue. Show growth stats if meaningful. Make sure to include at least one graph (made with good contrasting colors so the graph is legible even as a thumbnail).

- When you are ready, get your investors to share your profile with all of their followers. It doesn’t really matter what day of week or time of day, other than midday is slightly worse for response rates.

- Unfortunately, AL is no substitute for old-fashioned networking and hustle. Many of the investors there are part-time angels; they’ll put in $25-50k if you have so many other committed investors that it feels “safe” to them. The guy/gal who has the conviction and pockets to be your lead investor isn’t sourcing deals from AL. They are using their network, like they always have been.

Hope that helps.

Dave

*The only exception is trying to pull off the more advanced “advisory round” maneuver, where you raise less than $200k from really well-known investors at less than $2M valuation to position you with great social proof for your “real” seed round 3-6 months later. Only do this if those guys will invest again.

So I just got invited to be on the program committee for this year’s ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, held this year in Dublin, Ireland in October. I’m hugely honored for the invitation, as this conference is tops for academics who focus on this space. My duties are to peer review 2-3 Computer Science PhD level research papers.

The only downside is I have to cover all travel, lodging, and food costs. Is Dublin worth it? Can you make a vacation out of it?