How to Fill Your VC Fundraising Pipeline

Everyone starts their fundraising the same way:

1) Open a shared Google Sheet.

2) List all the VCs you've ever heard of.

3) Ask a bunch of people who they know.

4) Find out very quickly this isn't very effective.

First off, most people in the world can't name any VCs. I suppose if you're reading this post, you can name at least one--but I'm not even active anymore, so even if you could name a few, you might quickly find you have a relevancy problem.

Does this VC that you know do this kind of deal?

Do they do deals at your stage?

Is the firm still active?

Starting from a blank Google sheet and getting to the point where you have 20, 30, 50 or more *qualified* leads of investors for whom what you're doing is a fit is a very tall order.

Unfortunately, most of the databases out there dont quite make it easy for you to just say, "I'm X, who is looking for me?" and get an autogenerated list.

And yes, I tried ChatGPT. ChatGPT's data is two years old and when actual tech humans can't really differentiate easily between pre-seed and seed, who's a lead and who isn't, and whether or not someone is a real fund or just a broker, I wouldn't expect a bot to.

The problem is that the nomenclature very poorly describes what someone is actually willing to look at in any given moment. When you're applying to pre-schools, programs give clear cutoff dates. If your child was born before X date, you're either eligible or too late.

VC doesn't have those clear cutoffs.

Am I still pre-seed? I have revenue.

Do I pitch a consumer tech investor for my website that sells custom-fitted undershirts? Or is that only specifically people who say "D2C?'

Do you generally do pre-product or only when it’s your former analyst?

Plus, searching for what someone did in the past doesn’t necessarily guarantee they’re going to be interested in the future.

So how do you actually create a list that not only has enough names but has high-quality, relevant leads that will at least turn into meetings?

One word: Manually.

Step One: Top of Funnel

How do you actually build the list??

There are three main sources:

1) Other founders who raised *recently* in related areas. Even if you don’t know other founders well, founders are usually up for helping other founders. So, if you talk to folks who have raised a similarly sized round for something that isn’t competitive, but at least it’s in the same kind of ballpark, you’ll probably have some success asking if they’d be willing to share their lists.

You could also accomplish this by poking around on Twitter for posts where people have asked “Who are the top B2B SaaS pre-seed founds?” and a bunch of people have already responded. Still, don’t substitute that for live conversations.

2) Big lists other people are using for clickbait. Search LinkedIn posts for “VC lists” and you’ll get a lot of public postings like this one: