<aside> 💡 In order to raise a successful round, a couple of necessary steps need to be followed. In this stage, its all about building a product and achieving a product-market-fit.

a) It becomes immensely important to show first steps towards a well structured organization: Do you have a working prototype? Do you receive inbound attraction from potential customers? Ideally you have initial commercial partnerships that enable you to write first invoices and make sure that you develop your product closely to the market. Did you successfully hire your launch team?

b) Looking into the future, what next steps are on the product roadmap? What is your ICP? How do you want to approach the targeted market? Which sort of professionalisation does your company need to prosper - key hires, where is talent required and where experience?

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Fundraising Preparations 🧪

General ℹ️:

Practice your pitch, over and over again
Curate an investors list (see here, for more details)
Activate your network in order to get warm intros (see here, for how to approach investors in general)
Formulate your ICP and a dedicated GTM (Who will buy the product and how are you approaching these profiles?)
Check your unit economics (Are you making money per customer?)
Clearly map the market and competition (How much can you sell and how?)
Extract the USP of your solution (What makes it unique? How hard is it for others to build something similar?)

Content to create 🗂️:

Build a pitch deck (see here, for more details)
Create a financial model (see here, for more details)
If applicable, prepare customer cohorts (How are you retaining and upselling customers?)
Keep your cap table updated (see here, for hick-ups to be avoided)

<aside> 💡 Take time to properly prepare the fundraising activities, approx. three to six months. This includes shaping your story around the financing round. Ask yourself the following questions:

Why is now exactly the right time to raise VC money? What will you achieve with the capital raised?

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Fundraising Prep Library 📚

<aside> 💡 The knowledge library is the engine room of this playbook, as you will find templates, checklists, and other actionable knowledge bits to be operationally applied in your fundraising activities.

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Overview of Relevant Tools 🛠

<aside> 🚧 We obviously haven’t tried all the tools, so this is not a blank proposal to use them all. However, we can pinpoint a couple of solutions that we majorly see in our portfolio.

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