How to plan and track your fundraising activity

Learn how founders use Rows to track fundraising activity: input contacts with Venture Capitalists, feedback, negotiation phase, investment amount.

Intro

Any founder knows that convincing investors to part with their money is no small feat, and it can be very difficult for a startup to stand out in a crowded market and prove its potential for success. Creating a compelling pitch, optimizing it after feedback, and coping with tricky questions or objections are steps of a learning curve that needs to be steep and fast.

That's why founders need to handle the process of raising money, often very time-consuming, in a methodic and structured way.

In this short guide, we'll walk you through a simple - yet effective - way to plan and track your fundraising activity.

Here's a sneak peek of what you'll get:

Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 12.04.56

Let's start!

To use our template, follow the link Fundraising tracker, click on Use template and save it in one of your workspace’s folders.

This template offers you an easy UI to plan and track your fundraising activity.

Let's reverse-engineer it together.

First, use columns A to E of the List table to input the details of the investors you are in contact with: start with the name of the fund, the role, full name, and email of your contact.

Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 12.16.52

In column B input the firm tier, where Tier 1 refers to the top, most prominent investors. We recommend you start your fundraising activity from the lower tier, to train your pitch, optimize your deck and learn how to cope with tricky questions or objections.

Column F is meant to note down some specs or preferences of each firm, such as preferred role, round sizes, ticket sizes, and industry or regional focuses.

Columns G to J aim is to track the progress of your conversation: pick the status from the dropdown list, input the date of your last contact, and the feedback. Column J displays the number of days since your last iteration, and updates every day through the following formula in the header:

1=AUTOFILL("Days since last interaction",REPEAT(TODAY()-H2,1,"d"))

The AUTOFILL() triggers the function in the second argument into all cells of the columns, when new input data are available. The formula REPEAT(TODAY()-H2,1,"d") triggers the difference between TODAY() and the last iteration date in H2 daily.

Finally, as this decision happens very late in the fundraising process, input the target investment amount in column K and leave column L for further notes.

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