121 days to go: slowing down to recover (without feeling guilty)

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

Jade Buffong-Phillips

Jan 30, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

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

Win🏅: 38 applications & 8 interviews for our Head of Product & Engineering role
Loss 🤕: I didn’t listen to my body (or my friends) and got sick 🤒
Lessons 💡: Why it’s hard to stop & take a break when you’re steering the ship
Resources 📚: Hustle Fund’s guide to fundraising for first-time founders

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

🎯 Objective

30x calls and 2 commitments Slowing down to recover

I had to slow down last week. After three pretty intense weeks, I caught a cold and put the breaks on as much as I could for half of the week (which meant getting less done and trying to stop myself from feeling guilty about it). Instead of powering through the usual fundraising to-do list, I focussed on:

Planning for the Head of Product & Engineering interviews
Making the final tweaks to the Mane Hook-Up stylist and customer community
Completing any syndicate application forms (that didn’t have 500 questions) 😅

It was also a gentle reminder that it’s important to plan breaks/time off (more about that in my losses) and, to accept that hitting pause is an option.

🔋 Progress recap & highlights

Biggest wins

WIN 1️⃣: We have 38 applications for our Head of Product & Engineering role (8x interviews lined up this week) 🧑🏾‍💻

I kick-started the recruitment process for our next team member and it went much better than expected. By the end of day one, we had 25 applications — all super strong and many who have shown a genuine interest in the Black hair industry (which I love to see).

Having spent 4 years working in the recruitment industry, and building plenty of teams, I know hiring can be painful if you don’t keep things in order. To stop that from happening, there are two things I really want to do during this process:

Keep it as clean and simple as possible: I firmly believe that you only need 3x rounds of interviews (screening, 1st stage and final stage) to decide whether someone should join your team. I can’t comprehend why some companies have 6x stages and drag the process out for months on end.
Have the support of someone who has been in a senior technical role in the past: I also believe in leaning into my strengths. As I haven’t hired a technical lead before, I would rather bring someone into the process who has been there, done it and worn the t-shirt.

While I’m excited to get into the interviews, this wasn’t originally on the cards for Q1…

I had planned to start recruiting after closing the funding round, but I quickly realised that a) if we’re going to start developing a new version of Mane Hook-Up, it’s better to have this person sooner rather than later and b) the conversations about recruitment give investors confidence that V2 will be built strategically.

I’ll shed more light on the recruitment process once the interviews are all done (hopefully by mid-February!). Until then, wish me luck!

TIPS FOR UPDATING YOUR PITCH DECK WHILE RECRUITING: Let investors know that you're recruiting by adding the top three profiles of the candidates you're interviewing in the deck. That way, they know hiring is on the way and you plenty of talented people to choose from.

WIN 2️⃣: I’m creating a fundraising resource kit for Founders 🧰

The past 3-4 months have been quite the journey. As I’ve shared all of my wins, losses and lessons, several founders have also asked what templates and resources I’m using to connect with and pitch to investors.

In a bid to help as many people as I can, I’ll be sharing a Fundraising resource kit which will have:

Financial model template
Marketing strategy template
Pitch deck template
Investor update template
3x cold outreach templates

Given the amount that’s happening, I’m hoping to finish the toolkit by the end of February and as a newsletter subscriber, you’ll get first dibs 😉. But I’d also love your help — just select the most important option in the poll (below) to help me prioritise which resources I should make available first.

WIN 3️⃣: Attended the Female Founder Rise Event at Google HQ in London 🎟️

Female Founders Rise brought 200+ women together at Google’s HQ in central London for a day of talks and networking.

As an introvert, I didn’t know if I could make it through an entire day 😅. Talking to lots of people is more draining than energising to me, so a 9-5 event can be challenging.

But, not only did the people at the event leave me buzzing, I attended some of the best and most helpful talks I’ve ever been to - period. From pitch deck tear-downs to advice on language/market fit, I walked away from this event with more ideas and tasks to make Mane Hook-Up and my funding round stronger.

Even better, every speaker at the event genuinely wanted to see women progress and secure funding in a space where this is very challenging. While there was endless knowledge shared on the day, here are the three best pieces of advice I heard on the day:

Proactively speaking to Angels: Go through their LinkedIn, identify people that you want to speak to, ask for warm introductions and explain why you believe they would be a great fit.
Language market fit (talk by SYSTM): People need filters to clearly understand what your product will help them achieve.
Investor outreach: Your only objective is to get to the next call. Start by sending useful, sensible emails and then share valuable info (e.g. FAQs, data rooms), to answer key questions before they come up.

For those of you who are looking for Founder communities to join, I highly recommend Female Founder Rise (and a few others like Diversity X, Elpha and Blocks to Bags).

TIP FOR ALL DAY EVENTS: Aim to connect with as many people as you can on the day and practice your 10s and 30s pitch on other founders. This is the perfect opportuntiy to make mistakes and ask for feedback (with less risk).

WIN 4️⃣: Automations update 🤖

I’ve created a new email automation for senior leaders in the afro and curly hair space. While they aren’t all traditional investors, they understand the market that my business operates in and that’s also super valuable. And, should I get a call with some of them, it’s an opportunity to gain an advisor (if not an investor).

Here’s a quick update on the performance:

💃🏾 84 people added to automations
📧 906 people have opened my emails (13% of the total - up 9% WoW)
🖱️ 105 clicks on our pitch deck (10% of those who opened - up 23% WoW)
↩️ 32 people have replied so far (1% of opens - up 166% WoW)
📞 3x calls booked (up WoW)

Similarly to last week, emails sent to investors based in Africa are still performing the best. In the next two weeks, I plan to add a link to my calendar in the emails to see if that improved the CVR to booking a call. I’ve held off on this as replies can also give you an indication of how interested someone is, but now that I’ve improved the template and subject line, it’s time to optimise the CVR of these emails.

Overall, the automations bring a steady flow of replies and calls each week, which supplements the rest of my outreach. The email series will stop around mid-March, so I’ll also invest more time in building the email list again (with the help of Fiverr).

TIP FOR AUTOMATIONS: The aim of outreach is to get to the next call. So, when you're drafting cold emails, consider what information an investor needs to recieve to be convinced that the call is worth their time. Prioritise sharing 3-5 facts/stats that put your business in a string position (whether it's about traction or the market).

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Biggest L’s 🤕

LOSS 😩: I didn’t listen to my body (or my friends) and got sick 🤒

There are beautiful moments in every friendship where one of you gets to say ‘I told you so’ and my best friend had the opportunity to do that to me last week 😆.

By the middle of January, things had been so intense that I started to feel a bit tired and run down. My best friend reminded me that yes I work for myself but everyone gets at least 25 days of holiday a year, so I need to schedule breaks before mybody forces me to take one instead.

Great advice, but I didn’t act fast enough to put it into practice and 8 days later, I had a glorious head cold.

Several boxes of tissues and packets of Strepsils later, I also realised that I couldn’t take a full day off because of all the calls in my calendar (it was a colourful, organised mess 😭).

I’m not the first (or last) Founder to suffer from burnout but feel like they can’t afford to take a break. Especially when you’re raising and have investor calls and follow-ups to prioritise. My experience taught me two things:

Prevention is the cure 😴: Getting enough sleep and planning days off will help you to re-energise and give your body the space to fully recover. Had I taken a day or two off sooner, I wouldn’t have spent 3-days recovering from a nasty head cold.
Don’t allow people to book calls with you every day of the week 📅: In an attempt to fit any and every call into my diary, I allowed people to book calls Monday to Friday, which made it very tricky to cancel or reschedule when I was sick. I’ve since changed my calendar so I only accept calls on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Two call-free days allow me to shift meetings when I’m sick and provide the much-needed downtime to get important work done.

Above all else, it taught me to listen to my friends 🤣 because no one likes to hear the ‘I told you so!’.

TIP FOR PLANNING BREAKS: If the average person has 25 days of holiday a year, you should take 2-3 days off a month. If you're like me, and organisation/scheduling is your jam, make it a recurring pattern (e.g. the 2nd and 4th Friday of the month) and try to choose a day that's usually quiet so it feels like there's no major consequences to taking that time off.

💡 Lessons learned

Quote of the week
It’s risky not to take risks.
— Brandon Steiner

LESSON 👩🏾‍🏫: It’s hard to stop and take a break when you’re steering the ship 🚢

Anyone who knows me will often hear me say “I don’t have time to get sick”. And it’s not a joke, I genuinely feel that way.

The time that I spend wrapping up in bed recovering feels like time and opportunities lost. I’m not saying that I necessarily miss out on anything, but that’s what it feels like. It’s really hard to say ‘take a break’, ‘stop for a moment’, or ‘pause’, even when you need to, when you are the captain of the ship (not to mention, there’s nothing worse than several days of administrative work all backed-up).

As I was forced to pause last week after getting sick, I reflected on why I felt the need to keep going. And it was largely down to feeling responsible for maintaining momentum. The last thing I want to do is lose steam when I’m on a roll, and that’s often why I struggle to take breaks. Even as I sit here typing this newsletter, I was supposed to take a break 15 minutes ago, but here I am powering through because of momentum.

I often get torn between trying to create balance and powering through and resting — haven’t figured out how to manage this yet, if you have please leave a comment with the magic formula 🙏🏾. But, after hearing the stories of so many Founders (especially at the FFR event last week), I get the impression that this imbalance will exist for a while. The early stage of building a start-up is so intense that burn-out, tiredness and the odd cold here and there feels like a right of passage.

As much as entrepreneurship is glamorised as a way to own your time, build long-term wealth and learn to become a leader, that’s an image that takes time and a lot of long nights to bring to reality.

I have no idea if I’ll be able to create more balance for myself any time soon, but I will (at the very least) take a day off here and there to keep my engine running.

💥 Hack of the week

Nothing new to add this week! Feel free to revisit some of the hacks from my previous newsletters:

📚 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.

Fundraising 101

Hustle Fund’s guide to fundraising for first-time founders: this is one of the best breakdowns I’ve read about the raising process. There is so much about fundraising that most people don't know until they’re knee-deep in it (and fighting to figure everything out). This book shares a great high-level view of what to prepare for and expect. I highly, highly recommend that any Founder raising reads this e-book.

Events & offers

Sie Raise Summit
London Tech Week
Google for Start-Ups Cloud Program: Get up to $200k in credit for two years for free from Google. Just complete the form and they’ll be in touch within a week.

🧰 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.

Elpha: an online community for women in tech

What’s it for: Women in technology who are looking for a community of people to connect with and learn from.
How it helped: I’ve used Elpha time and time again to find incredible women to work with and get support from. It’s both a forum and a job board, so you can also use it to hire talented women in tech.
Price: Free

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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