The Fundraising Field Guide Book

The Fundraising Field Guide was written to help early-stage tech startup founders decipher and navigate the fundraising process. It provides an overview of the soft and not-so-soft challenges you will need to prepare for as part of your fundraising journey, including things like reaching out to investors, dealing with rejections constructively, preparing materials and financials, understanding valuations and deal terms, and how to manage the legal process.

I hope you enjoy the book and get lots of use from it. I’ve adopted a ‘free-to-download-and-donate-if-you-like-it’ model because hey, if you’re fundraising, you’re bootstrapped right? If you do enjoy it, however, please consider donating to one of the charities in the “Get & Donate” section of this site to support organizations that are helping people around the world with their social entrepreneurship challenges.

To download the book, go to the book’s main website –

http://fundraisingfieldguide.com/donate

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The Changing Balance Between Experiences And Ownership: These Startups Enable It

Across society there is an increasing trend of experiences eclipsing that of owning material goods. We’re seeing this trend increasingly in action around the globe.

Some articles (U.S.News via Yahoo / Fast Company / NPR) have explained why millennials, for example, are choosing to live for experiences and less for ‘things’ (or at least the ownership of things). If and when they do buy things… there is a trend to buy things that have stories behind them and things that are longer-lasting. While the generational explanation helps explain an increase in some services and products, other articles simply point to economic stagnation as a main catalyst for the growth of the sharing economy.Economic concerns have also affected the luxury goods demand from Russia and China.

In addition to generational trends and economic circumstances, increasingly popular sociological movements like the tiny-house movement and the minimalism movement are promoting a simplified life that focuses on doing vs owning – and if you do own, have it be something that you’re likely to get value out of for a while (thus forcing a view towards higher quality affordable goods that don’t make you feel like they have designed obsolescence nor are about showing off).

Taking these trends into consideration, at Seedcamp we’re bullish on startups that bring experiences, meaning, convenience, and quality durable products to the market and/or allow for people to share products they own (enabled by tech to help them scale).

Below, is a list of Seedcamp companies that enable and participate in this trend:

PropertyPartner – Democratising investment in buy-to-let property at the click of a button
Try.com – Try clothes at home for free from any online store
Crashpadder (acquired by Airbnb: listen to the podcast) – Matching travellers to local hosts through shared interests
24 Symbols – A subscription service to read digital books on the internet
Divido – Consumer finance for online merchants
Fishbrain – A mobile app and social network for fishermen wishing to share and connect with other fishermen
BorrowMyDoggy – Find great local friends for your doggy
Teleport – Search Engine for Digital Nomads
Love & Robots – An online gift shop where you can buy 3d printed or customisable products
Hole19 – An app that helps you analyse your game and your golf statistics
Hype – Yelp + Timeout for spontaneous mobile generation
Lineup – The largest network of ‘what’s on’ guides in the UK
Incrediblue – An award-winning, online platform for unforgettable boating holidays
ByeBuy – Unlimited access to your favourite products. Pay-as-you-go ecommerce
Car Quids – Connecting brands with unique, targeted outdoor advertising spaces
Wriggle – Connecting users with unsold spaces at local food, drink & entertainment businesses at a discounted price
Krak – A skateboarding studio that aims to make the world a huge skatepark
Wanna – Home for parents, where they can buy and sell products and services locally
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Deciphering Crowdfunding For Startups

One of the options that founders are reminded of more and more above and beyond VC and Angel funding is Crowdfunding via online platforms such as Kickstarter, AngelList, and Seedrs, to name a few. However, these platforms are not all the same and in this post we’ll cover how they differ as well as what makes them unique.
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To help better categorize the use cases for the different types of crowdfunding platforms, let’s split them into two:
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1) Cash for Product Pre-Orders – Kickstarter, IndieGogo, etc.
2) Cash for Equity – AngelList (USA), Seedrs (UK), Crowdcube (UK), etc.
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The Top Ten Fundraising Fails

Fundraising isn’t easy, even if done well, its fraught with all sorts of ambiguity and frustrations. To that very point, I recently wrote a blog post about the fundraising mindset in order to help you set a tone on approaching the process.

That said, there are things you can do to make it go better than others and things you can do to make it go worse… and in the spirit of the ‘Tonight Show’s’ top ten list, below are my top ten things that will likely cause a fundraising fail situation.

Avoid them and learn from your mistakes and you will increase your likelihood of success.

– 10 – Presenting with a style that doesn’t capture the right attention. Yes, being over the top and dropping ‘f bombs’ might get you attention, but is it the right attention? Is it focusing the attention on what your message or just you? Also, what about a boring slide deck? Or a a deck that is missing product shots? Do these represent you well? What if you say your product is simple, but then your deck is really over complicated.. does that sound right?

– 9 – Not having a proper fundraising plan. Fundraising requires research. Find out if your potential investors are even interested in your sector.. have they invested in your competitor? What amount do they typically invest in? Going to someone that is a late stage investor when you are raising a little bit of money is like putting in a minimum order of 10 pizzas when you can only eat one.

– 8 – Not understanding your customer and how to reach them. When presenting or speaking about your customer, do you show a mastery about their issues? Do you understand what makes them tick and why your solution is the one that will likely best serve their needs? Do you also understand how to reach them? Where do they shop? What media do they consume?

– 7 – Unable to demonstrate a real pain for your customer (and how your solution fixes it). It is always tempting to create something that is useful to you, but is the solution you’ve created really a necessity or just a nice-to-have? Demonstrating a real pain, usually through some form of customer validation, is crucial in making a convincing argument for your startup.

– 6 – Assuming that a general market size study applies to your startup. One of the things you can do to quickly show that you don’t have a full grasp of your market is by showing a much larger segment than the one you operate in.  For example, I’ve seen pitches where an iOS app that is for sports tracking, mentions all mobile users worldwide as their market size… when actually, its more like mobile-sports-tracking-enthusiasts, which is a sub-segment of that bigger pie.

– 5 – Not truly understanding who your competitors are. This one is easy. If you think you don’t have competitors, then you probably haven’t researched hard enough. Rarely are there ideas that no one has thought about, but secondly and perhaps more importantly, sometimes there are substitutes which are ‘good enough’ which you need to be aware of and show how your solution overcomes the momentum that those existing solutions already have.

– 4 – Not knowing your cash needs & cash burn. If you’re going fundraising and you don’t know how much money you need, how long it will take you, to achieve what, and how you will spend it… well, then don’t fault investors if they aren’t impressed with your request for investment.

– 3 – Not explaining why your team is the team that will make this happen. Your team is 99% the reason why your company succeeds, and the idea is probably like 1% (I’m guessing on the numbers, but this guess feels right). If you skim through the ‘why’ of why your team is the right one for this investment, then you’ll likely miss an opportunity to impress an investor. I recently wrote a blog post about how to best think through your team slide here. Also, if you want to learn about how an investor evaluates your team, read this one.

– 2 – Having your existing investor shareholders own more equity than the founders. Toxic rounds that precede the round you are raising for can really negatively affect your fundraising plan. Read about why here. In general, try and make sure that you take investments that don’t jeopardize your future ability to raise follow-on funds.

– 1 – Not reaching out to an investor through an introduction. Lastly, the best thing you can do for yourself is get an introduction to investors that you want to meet. Introductions are great ways to have immediate validation. Here are some other ideas on how to reach out to other investors.

– Bonus – Not learning from your mistakes. Learn from your mistakes. You will make many, and that’s OK, so long as you don’t beat yourself up, understand what went wrong, and then iterate on it. In the words of Einstein – “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Below is the video of this presentation.

Below is the slide deck that I used to present at Google Campus’s Fundraising Day.

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