How I met 75 investors and raised $650 000 in three months

Three months. 75 investors. US$650,000 raised. My company, Love With Food, graduated from 500 Startups’ accelerator program about a year ago and we raised US$650 000 in June of 2012. It was three painful months of fundraising. If you think fundraising was a piece of cake just because we were a 500 alum, think again.

When I first began fundraising, all I heard was words of discouragement. Most told me the food space is hard and being a solo founder makes my path even more difficult. Fundraising is one of the most painful things I’ve done in my life. It’s physically exhausting and worst of all, it was mentally torturing. My mind started to play games with me, and every waking moment, I had to fight thoughts of being a failure and was at the brink of giving up countless times.

Not only did I have to endure the heartache of rejections, I had to defend myself against cynicism that I didn’t have an Ivy League education hence I wasn’t qualified to run a startup. There are many reasons not to fund my startup, but me not having a certain type of education is definitely not a legit and fair one. I remembered walking out of that meeting and said “Watch me, I’ll prove you wrong.”

Prove her wrong, I did. In three months, I pitched to 75 investors and raised more money than we needed. People often ask me how I met 75 investors. Here’s what I did:

Wear your company T-shirt

If you know me, you know that I’m always in my startup’s t-shirt, jeans and a black blazer. In the usual fashion, I wore my Love With Food t-shirt to the Women 2.0 conference last year. During lunch, this dude hollered, “Hey, Love With Food. I read about your company. I’m intrigued. Tell me more!” It so happened that this dude is the partner at Blue Run Ventures. After the conference, we met up again and he wrote me a cheque within a week.

Angel List

Be on Angel List. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have your company profile on Angel List. After we started to trend on Angel List, we had many people interested in what we were doing. In the end, three of those invested and one of them eventually became our lead. If it wasn’t for Angel List, I wouldn’t have met these three investors.

Be flexible

Be ready to fly or drive to meetings at a moment’s notice. There are days where I had five meetings back to back. Yes, it is a lot of driving, but being flexible helped me get investor meetings.

Reach out to your network

I’m very lucky to have many friends in the startup community. I reached out to my network of entrepreneur friends and asked for introductions to their investors. Everyone I reached out to was so generous. My friend Amra Tareen, founder of AllVoices.com, single handedly got me 10 meetings. Volunteering at Women 2.0 as the pitch director helped too — I got to know many investors over those three years of volunteering and it made it easier to reach out for help.

Don’t be lazy. Follow up with updates

After every meeting I wrote a thank you email and in the following weeks I continued to provide updates and progress reports to potential investors. This is of paramount important in fundraising. It’s the only way to show persistence. For an early stage startup, there’s really no good data to show other than persistence. You want your potential investors to see that.

Email potential investors once a week

Investors get pitched all the time. You want to be on their radar constantly so that they won’t forget about you. I kept a spreadsheet with their names and dates like when we first met, first progress email sent date, second progress email sent, etc. After sending three update emails, if I didn’t hear back, that was usually a sign that they were not interested. It’s also a great way to sieve out those that are really interested from the maybes.

Find your connection

I met an investor at an event and found out he invested in another subscription commerce company. In our brief conversation, I found out that he used to live in Singapore (where I’m from) and he speaks Mandarin. I really wanted him to invest. One thing Singaporeans love to talk about is food and I made sure our conversation was filled with that. In the following six weeks, I would write him emails and left voice mails in both English and Mandarin. You get the picture? He finally invested and I seriously think he wrote us a cheque so that I would stop harassing him.

Go all out to get the press attention

Love With Food received some press mentions on sites like TechCrunch and Mashable previously. However the most impactful press coverage was the one written by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch. She wrote about how I kidnapped her in the ladies room to get her to pick Love With Food as one of the Top 7 Startups on Demo Day. Two investors reached out after that article because they liked my tenacity.

Get current investors to make intros

Warm intros are the best intros. You current investors want to see you reach the finish line. Get them to pimp you to their other investor friends.

There’s no cookie cutter formula to fundraising but I believe the common denominator in fundraising is perseverance.

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This guest post by Love With Food founder and CEO Aihui Ong originally appeared on e27, a Burn Media publishing partner. Image: MayteKr via Deviant Art.