Confession to start: my co-founder and I made up a startup last month and pitched it to 100 venture capitalists. Realistic space, realistic team, realistic deck. We're not naming it because the point was the experiment, not the pitch. And before anyone panics, we politely declined to move forward with everyone, because, well, the company doesn't exist. Sorry for the noise to any VCs who might recognise themselves, hope we didn't offend anybody, and always happy to chat properly. The deck was decent though, in our humble opinion.
Why we did this: we tried to raise about a year ago for a different project, mostly cold because our network was thin. It was brutal. 60+ hours writing emails, second guessing every line, watching most of them go nowhere. We always wondered whether we just sucked at it, or whether the numbers really are that hard for everyone. We haven't seen many founders publicly share their actual funnel from cold VC outreach, so we figured we'd run it again properly and find out.
Same shape both times. 100 funds, sequence of 4 emails each (first email plus 3 follow ups), spread over roughly a month.
Our previous attempt, about a year ago:
Claude Code
Causo
@mazin_assaf thanks so much and thanks for being a very early user, we appreciate you!
Definitely great points on the availability of funds. We're updating our investors DB daily and it takes a little while for new funds to be shown in it as we make sure there's no mistakes / out of date info / hallucinations / info is rich with recent news. More funds will be coming soon!