Your primary focus post-demo day should be on closing funds. Post-Demo Day, you have a small window to really drive urgency to get investors to move. This window only lasts for a small time (8 weeks). After this point -- if you have not fundraised -- people may start to ask “Why not?”. During this window, people will give you the benefit of the doubt that you have lots of interest, and this can help nudge them forward to move more quickly than they might otherwise.
You now need to drive 2 parallel processes to close investors: one for Angel Investors (individuals who will write $100k checks or less), and one for Institutional investors (e.g. strategics and traditional venture capital funds that will require multiple meetings to make a commitment).
You want to take meetings with both types concurrently.
The Angel Investors will write small checks, but hopefully quickly. The institutional funds -- though they will require more time -- can write one large check if they come in.
Our strong advice is to pace out the investor meetings you have. We discourage you from doing phone calls as follow up meetings. Instead, schedule the meetings in person in blocks you can handle. That might be 8 per week. Stagger them across weeks so the load is doable (instead of doing all of them at once via short phone calls for example).
Also make sure you have a diverse mix of investor types each week. Don’t just meet with top tier funds all during one week. Each week have a mix of top tier traditional funds, second tier funds, strategics, seed funds, individuals, etc. Spread them out across the weeks you have.
And meet in person. The reason why is that if you don’t get called back for 2nd meetings -- or get outright dinged -- you can get feedback / tweak your presentations for the next set of meetings.
If you are called into follow up meetings, you can always front load the meetings that were scheduled for later by explaining you may have to make more urgent decisions. And if you have a MIX of types each week, you can front load those types where you are getting more interest. For ex, you may be getting strong interest from strategic investors, not traditional VC’s, in which case you can move the strategic meetings up.
Here's a list we compiled of the top VC funds. This is a generic list. (The seed funds are on the second tab and we need to update this).
You should supplement this list with funds specific to your vertical that are well regarded but might not be generic funds.
We took a bunch of ratings and tried to synthesize an Alchemist composite. Please note: this list is not necessarily who's best for you - pls do your own research.
Please Review the Alchemist Angel Fundraising Guide and create your own master list of all the investors -- angels and institutions -- you want to pitch. Also add all investors you have already met in the past that wanted to stay connected with you. Investor Pipeline Mgmt Templates from Pete Kim, Class II is good. Please make a copy of this version and share with Ravi, Danielle, and Mia (mia@alchemistaccelerator.com). You want to have at least 60 names listed out.