Your Pre-Seed Fundraising Checklist ✅
The more organised you are the better :)
It’s hard building a business, much less having to fundraise for it.
Fundraising is hard work!
It will take time, preparation and energy
And ironically, it can quickly become a distraction
A distraction from running and building your business.
To make the best use of your time and stay efficient
It helps to run a tight fundraising process
As an investor, i have seen a few founders run an incredibly efficient process
And i want to share what resources they leveraged
Here’s a checklist i see with the most organised and prepared founders:
Strong Pitch Deck (Teaser): 5 - 6 slides
These quickly show the problem, solution, team and traction. Share these widely. Decks can be uploaded on Docsend and it helps to track who is looking at your deck by requiring emails before viewing.
Full Pitch Deck (Longer + More Data): 10- 15 slides
Usually presented during the pitch call, or shared directly when you’re confident of who’s looking at your deck.
Your Introduction Script
This is your introduction during a pitch, it should be constructed to show WHY your team is the BEST team to solve the problem in 1-2 mins. Write this script, edit, and practice this LOTs of times with your friends, angels and get feedback. This will set the tone of your pitches.
A Product Demo
loom helps to present a video walkthrough of your solution. If you don’t have a product yet, wireframes of the product/ anything visual can be a good substitute
A Simple Data Room
Docsend/Googledrive/Dropbox are great solutions. Here’s a great article on what to include in your data room
A Forward-able summary on your startup
This is a paragraph + 3-5 bullet summary that introduces your startup, problem, solution, market, team and traction. Example below:
Maria is Founder and CEO of AfroPitchPrep, a platform that helps African founders with education, network, and access to get pitch ready and fundraise successfully. Maria 10+ year professional experience spans scaling multinational tech startups like Uber, and Branch.co in leadership roles.
In the day, Maria leads a European fund investing in founders across B2B Software, Fintech and Health, and at night and weekends, Maria leads AfroPitchPrep with an army of incredible volunteer investors.
Adult Population estimated to be over 25bn by 2050, AfroPitchPrep in just a few months has already helped over 150+ founders
Founders span across West, East, South and North Africa with resources, education and access to raise their first funding round.
We are currently raising a pre-seed round of £1m pre-seed round to build out the team and product
We have over half committed from leading angels and a global pre-seed VC investor*
*Please note that the summary above is just a sample 😊
Email templates (cold vs warm) to introduce your startup - standard and customisable email templates to help you send mass emails that feel personal.
How much you want to raise and what it helps you achieve?": Clearly showing what amount helps you unlock what milestones with the round.
Milestones can be revenue, users, growth rate etc. Funding round sizes can range from as low as $100k, to as high as $2m. It is common for founders to “tranche” their round. Raise some from angels, and build to get more traction, then raise an additional amount from VCs, all within one round.
What Instrument: Are you raising an equity round, or on a SAFE?
Runway: Decide how long the funds will last if and when you raise it
When next you’re going to need to raise? Usually you have this information from a simple financial model of how much you need to spend. However 12-18 months is common in the industry with a widespread preference for longer runway of about18-24 months due to macroeconomic conditions.
A strong pipeline of qualified pre-seed investors/angels and who can introduce you - starting with angels. Here’s a template, and another that can help.
An FAQ Notion Page: This helps gives in-depth answers to frequently asked questions that require more time to explain.
Some founders use this to highlight independent research that really digs deep into the market size, and the overall size of opportunity using a bottoms up approach. Others might use this to highlight in detail the strength and relevant experience of the team in more detail I’ve seen some founders dig into their go-to-market, and demonstrate in a lot of detail how they will acquire the next 10,000 customers for example.
A newsletter template for prospective investors to keep them updated
This ensures prospective investors don’t slip and you’re keeping in contact in a scalable way while remaining top of mind for investors. Here’s a template, and another that might be helpful.
You definitely don’t need to have everything listed here to have a successful fundraise, but i’d say it doesn’t hurt to be prepared and organised.
Got questions? We will answer them. Ask your questions here, and we will feature in the next weekly newsletter. The more specific they are, the better.
Speak soon.
Maria
AfroPitchPrep