... little celebration post! We launched Causo 4 months ago with a simple thesis: get precise intelligence -> achieve big things when reaching out to strangers. Since then, startups using Causo

... recently launched the Causo Hub, a free collection of fundraising + GTM resources for founders. One of the things we just added is an accelerator deadline tracker : https://hub.causo.ai/deadlines The idea is pretty simple: instead of finding a random article from 2024 saying applications are "open", we try to keep the actual upcoming cohorts and deadlines in one place, together with the stuff you need to know before wasting an hour on an application. Here are the next ones ...

... couple of weeks ago we started testing Reddit ads for Causo Fundraising, mainly because Reddit has already been one of our strongest organic acquisition channels. After ~2 weeks: 226 spent 31,483 impressions 165 clicks 0.52% CTR 1.37 CPC ~10 conversions Those conversions have roughly covered the ad spend, so technically the campaign has paid for itself. Still, the results are quite a bit weaker than we expected. The biggest surprise has been the difference between creatives ... ... size of the database, what the product does, and the fact that you can try it for free. The targeting data is even stranger. Reddit says only 0.23% of the audience is associated with Startups & Small Business , despite Causo

... kept the exact Causo stack private because we thought it was part of the moat. Then we realized that knowing the tools is the easy part. Orchestrating them, verifying every result, building fallbacks and running the whole thing at scale is what actually takes the time and money. So we re making it public. This is how Causo

... while, we were tracking the usual SaaS stuff like signups, pageviews, DAU, WAU, and retention charts. Useful to know, but none of it told us whether people were actually succeeding with Causo. So we started using PostHog properly and built our own dashboards around the things that matter for our product. Causo

... Over the past few months, we have been building Causo around two problems almost every early-stage founder runs into: Finding the right investors and reaching out to them properly Finding potential customers with a real reason to buy Our fundraising product helps founders discover relevant VC funds and partners, research them, and run personalized outreach. Our sales product finds companies that match a specific ICP, identifies why they may be a good fit right now, finds the right people ... ... dawid_baranowski): @zackary__mooney  Most loyal tbh will always be the early in network sales:) Comment from Dawid Baranowski(@dawid_baranowski): @rabnoor_s  I like uncomfortable questions :) We view the fundraising product as a specialised application of Causo

... Shameless self-promo, but we just shipped a massive update to Causo and I am genuinely proud of this one. We spent the last few months rebuilding our VC dataset from the ground up. We now cover: 1,000+ venture funds 17,000+ investors and investment professionals Fund size, cheque size, stages, sectors and geographies Investment theses, portfolios, recent investments and latest fundraises Individual investor backgrounds, focus areas, career histories and past investments Verified emails where available Sources ... ... underlying research Non-investment staff separated from the people who actually make investment decisions But the goal was never to build another giant directory or give founders a CSV and wish them luck. You add your company, and Causo

... everyone, We just opened up Causo.ai for sales lead gen. We originally built Causo for fundraising: help founders find the right investors, research why they fit, and write proper outreach instead of sending hope this finds you well slop to every VC with a pulse. Then people kept asking us the same thing: Can this work for sales too? So we built it. The basic idea is simple: Most sales tools start with a database. You filter by industry, headcount ... ... location, maybe job title, and then you get a list that is often stale, obvious, or the same CSV everyone else already bought. Causo

... more interesting things we have learned while building Causo is that people ask for automation, but what they really want is productivity. Those sound like the same thing but actually aren't. Ask someone what they want from an AI sales tool and the answer is usually: Just find the leads, write the emails and run the outreach for me. But the moment the tool actually tries to do that, the questions start: where did this company come from ... ... they might care right now, writing something that does not look like it came from a mail-merge factory. Yet most AI SDRs focus on sending more emails with fewer humans involved. We took the opposite approach with Causo

... sales guru energy. No I scaled to $10M ARR in 4 minutes nonsense. Just a small group of people sharing what is working, what is not working, and hopefully helping each other avoid a few dumb mistakes. Organized by Causo, same as last time. Good fit if you are: trying to get your first users or customers working through GTM doing founder-led sales testing outbound not sure if your positioning makes sense generally building something and trying ...

... founders to sign up for Causo after launch. Nice number. Felt good for about 12 seconds. Then we looked at the funnel properly and got humbled pretty fast. 253 created a company profile. 92 completed onboarding. 90 got matched with investors. 38 actually launched outreach. 18 became paying customers. So yeah, top of funnel looked pretty decent. But the real lesson was not how do we get people to sign up? It was: how do we get founders to trust ... ... product enough to actually press send on fundraising emails? That is a much harder problem. For context, Causo

... founders say they struggled with a post-launch lull, so here is what worked and didn't work for us since launch: Partnerships we partnered up with Techstars Startup Weekend Valencia to offer winners and participants discounts / freebies on Causo partnering / sponsoring events by larger players is ofc almost always a great way to grow but with caveats: this will often only be accessible through already in-network connections, and should be balanced, so you don't spend all your ... ... about launching a Discord server, similarly for founders to support one another with fundraising and sales. Wondering if that's interesting? Community requested features we shipped a bunch of things that was directly requested by our community: a new Causo

... been blown away by the response to our launch :) thought to share a quick update on what's happened since: User success: -we had a huge user spike: 250+ new companies are using Causo for fundraising since our PH launch -we're seeing that many people join early, look around the investors database, then convert once they're ready to actively raise -we saw users send out 400+ investor emails and get 26 replies; avg reply rate ... ... click connect for Microsoft inboxes -50+ new free resources for sales and GTM over at https://hub.causo.ai/ -bunch of UI fixes - thanks so much for everyone who had feedback, it was all so helpful! -we're rolling out Causo

... folks, we're currently rolling out Causo but for GTM: agents that understand your business, find companies you want to reach, get intel on the right people and write to them. Yes there are many tools like this: vibe gtm, AI growth engineering, AI SDR, etc. I tried so many and my main gripes were: -often it's oops just Apollo again -requires 5 different tools stitched together to actually work -dead leads, false positives, bad intel Causo

... free tool runs a structured audit through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Perplexity to show: -What each model knows about your startup -Where gaps exist -How to fix them We spun it off as a free tool out of Causo - our upcoming AI co-founder for sales, purpose built for AI native founders. It runs on the same enrichment logic that we're incorporating into our product. Give it a spin here - excited to hear your feedback! https://visibility.causo.ai ...

... building. Always happy to chat startups, fundraising, or just swap founder war stories. Comment from Evy Liu(@nemoevy_liu): Hello Ivan, nice to meet you! Comment from Ivan Semenov(@ivan_sem): @catt_marroll Hey there! We re building Causo right now giving vibe coders, solo devs, and pure tech founders a real shot at email outreach by automating practices that actually work, so they can stay focused on product. Bootstrapping for now (3 repeat founders), but we ll explore raising ... ... product ready for testing by the end of the year. Comment from Ivan Semenov(@ivan_sem): We launched our first free mini product today as a team! Come check it out :) Comment from Mohit Mohta(@mohtamohit): Hey Ivan Causo

... baranowski): @jofra_g  big nerd energy all the way :) I think like many of us I thrive on seeing outcomes of hard work, fast - safe to say big corporate environments were never for me. Am currently working on Causo, a 0-to-1 sales tool for solo founders / AI native founders. The idea came from tinkering with a lot of AI builders, and building some pretty cool micro products, but noticing how selling is somehow actually more difficult than ...