142 days to go: We got our first yes!

A recap of week thirteen as a full-time Founder.

Jan 09, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

The first week of January has come with a HUGE win as we now have our first commitment from an Angel investor 🥳

Given the first yes is always the hardest to get, this is a huge step forward in our round and is hopefully a sign of more to come.

With the holiday season done and our first full week of work out of the way, I have two objectives to focus on this quarter:

Closing the funding round
Building up the Mane Hook-Up community

And, I’m looking forward to sharing more of our milestones with you all as the year goes on.

A big thank you to everyone who has been reading along, sharing the 240 Days newsletter and offering help and guidance along the way this year. I really appreciate the support and hope that these weekly updates continue to help Founders who are raising!

For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you may want to skip ahead to…

Win🏅: We got our first yes from an Angel Investor
Lessons 💡: Be persistent with investor outreach
Hack💥: Email automation lessons from
Joe Rhew

As always, I appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave comments or reply to this email with your thoughts.

🔋 Progress recap & highlights

Biggest wins

WIN 1️⃣: We have our first Angel investor 😇. Say hi to Haley 👋🏾

There are certain moments of building Mane Hook-Up that I’ll never forget. Like:

Coming up with the idea,
Brainstorming the next steps on the back of a napkin with my best friend, and
Meeting our first advisor (Zena) during a live panel event at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton.

Now, I have another incredible memory to add to the list, which is Haley Bryant becoming our very first Angel investor.

Haley is the Principal at Hustle Fund, an Angel Syndicate based in the States, which focuses on B2B SaaS, digital consumer health and web3. In all of a week, she’s already been super supportive and the team is excited to have her on board.

As a Founder, the most important thing is working with investors who both care about the problem we’re solving and provide more value than money alone. Support is everything (especially through the highs and lows of building a business), so choosing your investors wisely is a must. Think of it as a marriage and you’ll be more likely to accept funding from the right people.

Overall, a huge thank you to Haley for believing in what we’re building and being the first to invest!

QUESTIONS TO ASK ANGELS: It can be hard (especially when you’re knee-deep in a funding round) to figure out who is a good fit for your team. Here are 9x questions you should ask to get to know them better.

WIN 2️⃣: 3x investor calls booked (2x from pre-Christmas/NY automations) 📞, 1x invited to apply for a Syndicate and 1x free event ticket 🎟️

I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it is definitely worth messaging people during the quiet season.

Here’s why:

Investor automations: sent messages out on the 20th-21st December and again between the 27th-29th. This series of emails led to 2x calls being booked last week, both of which I’m now waiting to hear about the next steps.
Personalised Merry Christmas messages: allowed me to connect with a seasoned Angel / Founder in the UK and I was offered a free ticket to an event later this month.
Personalised & HNY messages: allowed me to reconnect with Haley (after a busy holiday season), and ultimately led to us gaining our first Angel investor.
Being active on LinkedIn: during the first week of Jan, led to an Angel investor asking me to submit a funding request via their syndicate.

None of these interactions would have happened had I completely switched off during what is typically a quiet time of year. Instead of focusing on closing during the quiet periods, use it as a time to build relationships, show your gratitude and reconnect with people that you haven’t had a chance to speak to.

Those interactions may be just as meaningful as any phone call. Make time for them.

TIP FOR END OF YEAR COMMS: Keep track by of the most valuable conversations you've had in a Google sheet or Note pad. This will make it easier to send end of year thank you messages that are personalised. It's small things like this that can often help you to stand out from other Founders.

WIN 3️⃣: Email automations have been launched for investors in South America & Canada 📧

At the end of last year, I pivoted my investor outreach strategy and decided to speak to people outside of America and Europe. Mainly, I believe that speaking to more people who understand the problem we’re trying to solve, will lead to more commitments being made.

Here’s a quick recap of the new automations that have been launched:

💃🏾 1,633 people added to 3x new automation
📧 342 people have opened my emails (21% of the total)
↩️ 4 people have replied so far (1% of opens)
📞 1x call booked

Nothing much to report yet as the auomtations have only been live for a week (and we typically see a rise in responses after the 2nd email). But I’ll keep you up to date with our progress each week.

WIN 4️⃣: Goals for the quarter have been set 🎯

One of my favourite sayings is, ‘a goal without a plan is just a wish’.

That’s why I tend to spend the first few days or the first week of the year ironing out our objectives for the quarter. Given we need to focus on both the funding round and product growth, I’ve honed in on those two things.

Last year, I made the mistake of having one too many goals and spreading myself too thin. So narrowing things down to two goals (and also distributing the load to my team), will help us to get there faster.

TIP FOR SETTING OBJECTIVES: There are plenty of ways to set business goals. A lot of start-ups use the OKR (objectives and key results) method. Do your research to understand how you can set goals and also create an environment that encourages your team to hit or surpass them.

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Biggest L’s 🤕

None to report for last week! It’s only the first week of January so there’s plenty of time for the L’s to come.

💡 Lessons learned

Quote of the week
If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active.
— Brian Tracy

LESSON 👩🏾‍🏫: Be persistent with investor outreach

I’ve been guilty of reaching out to people later (rather than sooner) as for fear of pestering them too much.

That stops this year.

Mainly as that could have cost us our first investment opportunity.

Take the end of last year for example… the holiday season is busy for everyone (especially in the States where Thanksgiving and Christmas are back to back). Haley and I hadn’t had a chance to speak via video call since early November.

Even though our last conversation felt really positive, I was cautious about reaching out too often. By the time I got to the end of December, I had almost talked myself out of following up with her, purely because I was worried about overdoing it.

After taking the plunge in January by sending a Happy New Year message and asking for some time to catch up, a few hours later, Haley had agreed to invest.

It’s hard when you’re in the thick of reaching out to investors, it’s easy to overthink. Sometimes, a delayed response isn’t about a lack of interest, or someone getting sick of seeing your name in their inbox. Sometimes it’s simply down to a lack of time and other things coming up in between.

One of the most important lessons I’ve taken from this process is, that assumptions are an energy and opportunity killer. Try your best to take each moment as it comes!

TIP FOR FOLLOWING-UP: give it 10 days or so between each follow-up email. That means, at the most, an investor is getting 3x emails from you a month. That's far from clogging up their inbox and gives you peace of mind before reaching out.

💥 Hack of the week

Email automation lessons from

Joe Rhew

For anyone who is considering setting up a set of investor email automations, here are some tips to make sure your emails don’t land in junk mail!

Set up a cold email-specific secondary domain: Setting up an entirely separate domain (e.g. say "name@trycompany.com"), and using that for your cold email purposes, helps compartmentalize domain reputation to email activity. This means your existing customers and partners who know you by your email, will continue to receive business/marketing emails. Any cold emails will originate from name@trycompany.com, and any repercussions (such as being reported for spam or hard bounces) will be limited to that secondary domain. You can set up a 301 redirect on the trymanehookup.com domain so that any visitors to that URL will be redirected to your main website.

Avoid hard bounces before sending emails: Ideally, you'd want to avoid hard bounces as your domain reputation takes a hit every time this happens. Running your entire email list first through a tool like Debounce and then Scrubby will help clean your list and ensure that you only have legitimate email addresses. Debounce is cheap and instantaneous ($10 for results on 5,000 emails); whereas Scrubby is more expensive ($27 for 1,000 emails) and takes 48 hours, but is more thorough.
Set up DMARC: this is an email validation system designed to protect a company's email domain from being used for email spoofing and phishing scams - it’s an industry standard practice to maintain your email reputation. If you don’t have one set up already, here are the instructions on setting it up for a Google Workspace.

A huge thank you to Joe for replying to last week’s newsletter with these tips!

📚 Resources

If you made it all the way to the end of this newsletter, you deserve a reward. So here’s a list of the best resources I came across last week to help you with your raise.

Contract templates

Y Combinator SAFE financing documents: For anyone who is raising, here’s a list of contract templates created by Y-Combinator. There are non-US and US templates available.

🧰 Founder’s toolbox

Anyone who knows me knows that I love finding tools, apps and systems to add to my arsenal. Here’s a list of the best tools that I found last week.

Debounce

What’s it for: An email validation tool that tells you to clean existing email lists.
How it helped: Debounce is one of the tools recommended by Joe in this newsletter’s hack of the week. You can get 5,000 emails checked instantly for all of $10, which is a steal.
Price: starting from $10 for 5,000 emails

Scrubby

What’s it for: Another email validation tool.
How it helped: Scrubby was also recommended by Joe - this platform can help you validate 1,000 emails for $27 a month. It takes a couple of days but is more thorough than other tools out there.
Price: Starting from $27/m for 1,000 emails.

Questions? 🤔

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,

J x

P.S. Here are some of my other posts:

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