Introduction
This week we’re covering raising funds for your business.
We’ll be using AI to refine our fundraising, take over outreach and speed up pitching so we both have a higher chance of getting funding and can talk to more funders.
This process will be applicable whether you are raising cash for your side hustle, property investment, startup or even charity.
The basic steps will be the same – we’ll just be tweaking the details so as to fit your particular fundraising needs.
The plan for the week is:
Part 1: Nailing our funding requirements
Part 2: Writing a one pager
Part 3: Building a funding list
Part 4: Reaching out to funders
Part 5: Killer pitch decks
Nailing our funding requirements
How much cash and what you need it for determines how we raise it.
Different funding sources play in different investment ranges.
Very broadly we have:
- Friends and family (<$50k)
- Angels ($25k-50k)
- Accelerators / Incubators ($10k-100k)
- Crowdfunding ($10k-100k)
- VCs ($500k+, median deal in the millions)
- Banks (varies)
- Corporate Investors (varies, but high)
- Government / charity grants and loans (varies)
These are massive generalisations and will depend on both your niche and your geography. What’s important is that you know there are different levels of funding available and its important you aim at the right level.
If you approach a VC asking for just $10k you’ll be laughed out of the building. Or more likely ignored!
Let’s use a prompt to work out what sort of funding requirements we have.
If you run a charity adjust this accordingly – switch “business” to “charity” and any other relevant adjustments.
Act as a fundraising strategist for my business.
Ask me a series of question and then provide recommendations. Ask each question one at a time, collect my answer and move to the next question.
1. What is your business and what's the primary business model?
2. What country do you primarily operate in?
3. What's your business' annual revenue?
4. What do you need to raise funds for? What's the primary usage?
5. How much do you think you need to raise and why?
Use the information provided to
i) suggest what funding sources should be considered. Keep in mind the amount required and use this to exclude certain sources of funding that I fall outside of.
ii) challenge and provide suggestions for the amount requested - both the amount and usage. Ask user to clarify requirements based on suggestions
This prompt will guide you through a quick process and spit out some potetial funding sources like so:
In this particular example I asked for just $15,000 funding.
As such you’ll notice options like VCs have been excluded and instead smaller funding sources like micro-loans, small business grants and bootstrapping are suggested instead.
The prompt will also provide some pushback and ask for clarifications based on the information provided:
Use these pushbacks to refine your potential funding sources. For example here the pushback is actually suggesting not raising cash! That’s a perfectly valid option if you are already generating revenue and can bootstrap.
For now the main outcome you want is a list of potential funding sources – we’ll use this in the next Part to start researching potential funders.
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