Fundraising through LinkedIn Pt. 1 - Targeting🎯
Everyone uses LinkedIn but not everyone knows its true power. In this series I'll explain how to harness it to close your funding round faster.
From the outside, LinkedIn is quite boring and most people use it for three main reasons:
Post updates about their new jobs that nobody reads.
Grow their network just so it becomes an inactive weight.
Spam their inactive network with invitations to random events.
Of course, I’m exaggerating, but if you know what I’m talking about, this series is for you!
Here I’ll explain how to use LinkedIn in a smart (and sustainable) way without dumping too much time into it and yet, not sounding like a bot🤖
The main reason why so many people on LinkedIn come off as annoying bots is because they use the “spray and pray” approach. The logic that those people use is “sound” - I have 10,000 connections, if I send 5,000 messages to them about my new webinar, at least 200 will sign up and from those 200 at least 100 will show up to the live event and from those 100 at least 20 will buy something.
Well, it’s a numbers game isn’t it? Those are some shit numbers if you ask me and most founders don’t have 10k people in their networks because they don’t have all day on “networking”. In this mini-series I’ll talk about how you can improve those numbers, not sound like an annoying bot and yes, grow your network that will actually be worth something.
Target.🎯
Every message that doesn’t go to spam starts with a good target (or a really good copywriter) and that’s exactly what I’ll cover in this post. If you have found the right target audience, half of your job is done and it works both for sales and fundraising so you might kill two birds with one stone in this post;)
Here is how to find investors on LinkedIn who will invest in your fundraising round:
Decide who your ideal investor is.
Find investors who are active on LinkedIn, not just those who login once every month to post updates about their new investment.
Refine the target with filters.
Bam💥 target found! And yes, it takes just three bullet points to identify the right people on LinkedIn and yet, many people butcher it. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to you and go step-by-step through the strategy of targeting the right investors.
1. Decide who your ideal investor is.
This is done based on two key indicators: a) the stage you are in and b) the industry you are in. Point a) is very simple - just look at the round you are raising: Pre-pre-Seed, Pre-Seed, Seed or Series A+. This will help you understand what class of investors is most suitable for you.
To help you with this, our amazing designer Lisa created this helpful chart that breaks down the Type of investors based on their decision speed, average check size, main value add, involvement level, preferred investment stage and main downsides.
Take your time to review this chart and think about the type of investor that fits your company best and let’s move on to step 2.
2. Find investors that are active on LinkedIn.
This is an easy part that requires just a tiny bit of creativity. There are many ways of finding investors who are actually active on LinkedIn and you might come up with one yourself but I would recommend taking a look at something that many founders forget - Events.
I know, I know, I started this post by mocking event-promotion through LinkedIn but you aren’t promoting an event, are you? No, you are using events as a place to find investors who are looking to write a check.
Imagine: you walk into a YC demo-day. This is a great day, dozens of amazing companies are presenting on stage and of course you are happy for them, but you wish you could get just a few minutes in front of the investors sitting in that audience.
Now imagine if you could just walk around this room filled with great (and eager to write a check) investors and gave every single one of them a tiny piece of paper with a note saying:
Hey NAME, I saw you were checking out YC demo-day, have you found anything investment-worthy there?
Why the F*** would I give them such a note? - you may ask. Easy, your goal is just to spark a conversation with those investor and see what they like to invest in, what are some green and reg flags they look for in a presentation and of course, to utilize that information to close your round.
This is exactly what LinkedIn events are - a place where you can walk around the audience and slip every attendee a small piece of paper with your message on it.
And before you jump to any conclusions about my “genius” imaginary note, remember - this is just an example. You don’t need to copy-paste everything from this post. This is a step-by-step guide on how to utilize LinkedIn to close your funding round faster but not a copy-paste tutorial where you have to follow every step precisely. Go get crazy with your creative alterations to the process and see what works for you🤪
We’ll go into further detail of copywriting when it comes to contacting investors from certain events (Pt. 2 of the series) but for now, let’s take a quick look at the events that I talk about.
Example 1: go to LinkedIn and search “startup pitch” - the most basic search you can do when it comes to this strategy but it’ll give you a good idea of the events that you can find there.
224 results. Not bad, eh? Of course, a big chunk of those events later in the lineup have 1 or 2 attendees but at least 15 of them have 100+ attendees and this is exactly what we are looking for.
Before we move to the part where I explain how you can slip a note to everyone in this virtual room, we need to get into this room and this part is actually simple. Just click “attend” button and bam - you have access to all the attendees.
And on this sreenshot you can see that I have a button “Import members on Waalaxy”. This is a step in Part 2. where I will explain how to actually contact all those attendees using automations and yet, not sounding like a robot. But now we’re going to the last step of today’s post -
3. Refine the target with filters.
This part involves the most creativity required for the entire process. Here you have to use the information from step 1 - “Target” and apply to step 2, resulting in the perfect target for you.
So based on your targeted investor, you will need to find the most suitable events to find them. For example, if you are a biotech startup, you can start with a search that looks like this:
The key to success in this step is a lot of iterations of your search. Plug in new keywords, change the number of words in the search, simplify, make it more complicated. You might need to go through all of this to find a great target or you might just run into a perfect event after one search. As long as you don’t EXPECT this process to be very quick, you’ll do just fine.
This concludes the first part of your 3-step strategy that will help you close your funding round through LinkedIn. In the next two posts I will explain the following:
How to use automations for outreach on LinkedIn.
How to construct a proper message sequence for said outreach.
How to nurture connections you make through this strategy.
And of course, how to utilize the whole thing to close your round faster.
If you got to this point, this means you are serious about fundraising. And I hope that you have found this and other strategies explained on this Substack helpful to your fundraising round and will share it with a friend.
And there are very few gifts for $5 that would remind someone of you on the weekly basis in the most useful way possible so share the gift with a friend today❤️
However, if you feel like this content isn’t helpful, I’m willing to duel you 1:1 to death.
Just kidding, simply email me directly at konstantin@fundraising-courses.com and share your thoughts. A lot of content that my team generates is based on requests from our listeners and readers and we’re always happy to hear from you!