Make investors subscribe to YOUR mailing list!📬Part 1 - finding contact information.
Every VC tries to make you subscribe to their email list but how about turning the tables? Part 1.
Why do YOU need to start building your investor list?
You don't create your mailing list for investors "because everyone does it". On the contrary - you need to create your mailing list for investors because practically no one does it. And what happens when you do something that very few others do? That's right - you stand out from the crowd!🐑
But before we move any further, let me briefly explain what an “investor mailing list” is.
It is one of the best strategies that allow you to close your funding round in 2 weeks - that’s what it is. An investor mailing list (in the future referred to as IML) is an email list just like any other but consisting only of potential investors and advisors.
How does IML work?✉️
Before you start fundraising and I mean, LONG before you start fundraising (at least 4 months prior to opening your round), you start reaching out to potential investors with the message that sounds like:
“Hi XYZ investor, I’m running a Fintech startup and plan to fundraise in about 5 months. I saw that you have made quite a few investments in Fintech startups and was wondering if you want me to add you to our mailing list to keep you posted on our progress?”
Then over time your email list will fill up with interested investors whom you will send monthly (or bi-monthly, or quarterly) updates about your progress.
When the time comes, you will reach out to your entire IML and announce that you have opened your funding round and start meeting investors.
If you have started building your IML in a timely manner, by the time you open your funding round, the investors who are in your IML will already be know your company🦄 and maybe you personally (depending on how you construct your updates). This means that you will have a warm connection with dozens or hundreds of investors even if at the start of your journey you had absolutely no connections in the field.
And this is why YOU should start building your Investor Mailing List ASAP! In this series of 4 emails (coming out every week), I will explain the following:
How to find the contact information of investors in a semi-automated way.
How to construct high quality emails for IML.
How to utilize your IML without breaking SEC rules and regulations.
Finding investors through Apollo.io
First step in this process will be to set yourself up with Aollo.io - I recommend getting a Professional plan which allows you to export up to 10,000 emails per month.
Below is the quick 4 minute introduction to using Apollo and finding the right investors for your email list:
Before wrapping up the first part of these series, I would like to say a big thank you to Coby Konrad who introduced me to Apollo.io which I will use in these series to find contact information of investors. You can find some great advice from him on his Substack:
I have developed this mini-series due to a general lack of awareness that founders have about this subject, hence missing out on an easier way to fundraise and because today I have received my 10th+ request to explain how I build MY email lists.
This is a mini-series so it should take you a maximum of 30 minutes to go through the whole series and another hour or two to set it up and start constructing YOUR IML.
If you want to check out some other advice on fundraising, check out our team’s (Fundraising Radio’s) course about fundraising for early stage startups.
This concludes the first part of these email series of 4, in the next part I will explain how to automate your search of investors and gather massive email lists of investors (which we will later carefully clean up).