🤔 Fundraising Masterclass: A 4-Part Series by Whym Founder & CEO

Welcome! My name is Kelly Nyland. Currently, I’m the Founder & CEO @ Whym. I made this Loom series to help other founders by offering them best practices that I have learned from company builders in my network.

This series is category & stage agnostic. These best practices have been applied to raising $9m in early stage & Series Seed funding over the last 2-4 years - through 2020, remote work and tumultuous economic conditions. I believe these methods scale into Series A, B & beyond.

My sole aim is to help new founders get set up and to help current founders add a few more tools to their fundraising toolkit when they stall out or need more inspiration to finish a current raise.

🏁 Lesson #1 // How to qualify your investors

9 minutes (💡4.5m on 2x playback rate)

Statistically, I believe you need 120 qualified investors to get 2-3 to say “yes”. Most founders waste a ton of time talking to unqualified investors. Top reasons you’re wasting time:

1. You’re not targeting the right stage of investment
2. You’re not looking at which investors are actively investing in your sector
3. You’re taking any/every warm intro without pre-qualifying

How to qualify a solid 120 investors:

• Do they invest in my sector?
• Are they actively investing?
• Do they participate at my round size?
• Are they a lead or follow at my stage?
• Do they invest or have they invested in my competition?

Resources in video:

Crunchbase Queries

Medium article on how many investors you need

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Get to Know Kelly 🤝

Kelly is a Cannes-Lions award winning marketer turned founder and CEO—who's built not one, but four successful companies in the past 15 years. Partnering with industry giants like Apple and Amazon, she has launched over 120 digital products, apps, and popular consumer electronics like the Star Wars BB-8 robot and SnapChat Spectacles across 40 countries. As CEO of Whym she's earned the backing of top Silicon Valley investors—raising over four million in funds.