114 days to go: doubling down on investor outreach and bouncing back from lows

A recap of week seventeen as a full-time Founder.

Jade Buffong-Phillips

Feb 06, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you may want to skip ahead to…

Win🏅: Discovered our email list is increasing 25% month on month
Loss 🤕: I hit an emotional low after a busy week
Lessons💡: Time out to recover can be the best emotional healer
Hack 💥: How to create a data room for investors (without paying for a new tool)
Resources 📚: Weekly and monthly KPI Google Sheets doc

As always, I appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave comments or reply to this email with your thoughts.

🎯 Objective

Contact or get warm introductions to our A-list investors

After fully recovering from the cold, I made it my mission to double down and speak to as many investors and Founders as I could. This meant:

Reaching out to investors who are department specialists (e.g. sales, marketing, product) to get advice on our business, pitch and outreach process.
Asking connections for warm introductions to investors who are on our A-list.
Chasing leads that had previously shown an interest in Mane Hook-Up.

Fortunately, this led to a lot of great progress (as seen in the weekly wins), but even with all of the great work happening, I hit an emotional low that I really struggled to bounce back from. Now, this probably wasn’t noticeable to others — I still jumped on every call, sent my follow-up emails and applied any feedback I received — but this sadness knocked me sideways as I couldn’t quite understand why I would feel low during such a productive week.

After some much-needed reflection over the weekend (and Monday morning as I finished writing up this week’s newsletter), I was able to unpick my thoughts and share them today.

I know plenty of you have probably felt this way too — sad, lonely or overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do list — and my only hope is that sharing my experience will help you and many others to understand: a) it’s normal and b) this too shall pass.

🔋 Progress recap & highlights

Biggest wins

WIN 1️⃣: 6x calls with investors, 4x incredible founder calls and warm intro offers 🧑🏾‍💻

Fundraising is a numbers game.

The more people you speak to, the more opportunities will crop up and present themselves. Last week was probably my busiest in terms of calls and face-to-face meetings — with both Founders and investors — and it was also one of my most productive.

I believe it’s important to balance investment calls with general introductions and feedback sessions as it gives me a chance to have very direct conversations about raising money and seek the support of people who are more experienced and connected than I am.

With 10x important calls or meetings lined up, here’s a quick summary of what happened last week:

Calls with 3x incredibly supportive Angels (one made my week 🥹): Two of these calls were about the funding round, and one was a feedback/advice session. While one investor wanted to commit (and unfortunately they don’t have the capital to deploy), they clearly believed in Mane Hook-Up, myself as a founder and the industry which meant A LOT. Sometimes votes of confidence make a huge difference, this one did for me.
Calls with 2x funds that I had been warm intro’d to 💰: Both calls gave me an insight into the application or accelerator process. And, fortunately, both of the people I spoke to offered to help fast-track my application to the review stage (which should hopefully cut the follow-up time in half).
Call & F2F meeting with Founders that energised me when I was down 🗓️: Last week was very mixed emotionally (more about that in the lessons). In the moments I felt exhausted and rundown, interactions with other Founders propped me up and kept me sane. I’ve said this a few times, but having a Founder tribe is so important in these moments.

Beyond these calls, I was also fortunate to get help and support from several people in my network, without asking. For example:

An Angel investor that felt I wasn’t the right fit, introduced me to a start-up operator and mentor.
2x Angel investors have offered to introduce me to 3-4 people in their network who may be interested in investing or could offer support.
A fund reached out to me and asked for my deck so I could be considered for the next deployment.

All of these interactions and conversations incrementally add up and have the potential to lead to some great outcomes. So, more than anything, I’m grateful to be in a position where people are: replying to my outreach, coming to be inbound and are comfortable with making a warm introduction after one or two interactions. Overall, all of these calls are helping me to progress with the round, providing the necessary support and broadening my network, so that’s definitely a win.

TIPS FOR CONNECTING WITH INVESTORS: Sucessfully fundraising often comes down to knowing how to build solid relationships with investors. You should reach out to investors who are very knowledgable (and can cover some of your weaknesses) to seek their advice. It's important to have asks that are about more than just money, to build a rapport with investors in your wider network. That way, when you are ready to raise, you can rely on them for additonal support.

WIN 2️⃣: 2x final stage interviews scheduled for Head of Product & Engineering 🥳

Two weeks ago, we kicked off the recruitment process for our Head of Product and Engineering role. While I didn’t originally plan to start the recruitment process until we’d closed the funding round, I’m really glad to go through this process now for a few reasons:

Applicant quality is HIGH: Amazingly, we’ve had over 40 applications and 90% of them are very high-quality candidates with some incredible experience under their belt.
Having a right-hand man or woman will give me more bandwidth: So much is happening right now and my biggest challenge is balancing the product and the raise. Having someone more senior onboard will help me to address the imbalance.

That said, last week, was also very busy interview-wise. I managed to:

Create a shortlist of 8x people: I started by narrowing the list down to the strongest applicants. I won’t disregard anyone else who has applied, but knowing I can’t speak to all 40 applicants means I have to prioritise them, starting with the strongest.
Tried to conduct all 1st stage interviews last week (but failed here 😅): In an ideal world, I would conduct all first-stage interviews in one week to make sure I get back to everyone in a timely fashion. But I had 3x calls rescheduled (2x from candidates, and 1x myself). Not a big deal, but a reminder that I can only plan so much.
2x people are through to final stage interviews next week: Both are strong contenders and I feel quite hopeful that we will find someone who’s a good fit. I always ask candidates to work on a task for final stage interviews. Mainly as they allow me to see how people work, think and attack problems. You can learn a lot about someone’s character from a task and, given the importance of this role, it’s important that I feel 100% confident whoever takes it on.

Final stage interviews are planned for next week, with a view to make an offer by mid-February. If all goes to plan, our team will be that much stronger and we’ll be able to do more throughout the raise. Another win.

TIPS FOR GETTING GREAT INTERVIEW QUESTIONS AND TASKS: Hiring the right person comes down to three things: 1) knowing who you're looking for, 2) asking the right questions and 3) creating a task that allows you to truly gauge their ability. Don't wing it. If you're recruiting for departments you have never worked in, ask your connections for help. Whether it's collecting great interview questions or asking them to be present for the interviews as a judge, do what ever you can to lean into the wisdom of others.

WIN 3️⃣: Discovered our email list is increasing 25% month on month 📈

This was one of the biggest wins of the week (not to mention, I stumbled across it unexpectedly).

I’ve been looking for — or trying to create — a tracking document for our KPIs. It’s been tricky as a lot of the templates out there are either way too complex for where the business is, or they’re built for different types of business (e.g. e-commerce, not SaaS).

But, last week, I finally found a Google Sheet template that works (the link is in the tools section, thank me later!). This nudged me to review all of our stats from November, December and January and identify some trends. While I’m usually on top of reviewing our website data (e.g. users, sessions, CVR), but I hadn’t looked at the size of our email list for a while, nor had I done a month-on-month comparison of its growth.

Having this new KPI document helped me discover that, not only has the list grown, but it’s grown by an average of 25% each month 🎉.

This is a huge win for two reasons:

It’s a traction lever that I can now use in conversations with investors, and
I can identify what we did in those months to produce that growth and keep doing it

Going through this process has highlighted the importance of documenting as much as I possibly can. It’s not good enough to know the stats in my head. Teams need access to that data and I need to extract useful information from it to tell stories that keep people engaged. Our new KPI document will play a huge role in making that happen going forward, so I highly recommend that you find one that works for you sooner rather than later.

TIP FOR MAKING TIME FOR STATS REVIEW: Block out 2-3 hours a month to do stats reviews and track your data. Creating this repeat habit will not only keep you in the numbers often enoguh, it will help you to have a deeper understanding of your business performance and what has/hasn't worked.

WIN 4️⃣: We launched customer and stylist communities to better connect with our audience 💇🏾‍♀️

After several weeks of prep work, we finally launched our stylist and customer WhatsApp community groups. This has been on the agenda for a month or so and we’ve done this for two reasons:

We want to help rebuild the damaged relationship between women and hair stylists in the afro hair community by starting engaging conversations.
We want to gain more customer insights into the industry and make sure our product really solves the problem.

With that in mind, I sent an email to our newsletter list and had a small group of people join the community in a couple of days. There’s still plenty to be done here, but the key thing was getting started to kick-start those conversations with stylists sooner rather than later.

WIN 5️⃣: Automations are starting to pick up 🤖

I’ve made minor tweaks to my automations each week since launching a new set in January. Last week was the exception, as I wanted to see if the changes I had made were making a difference.

That said, here’s a quick update on the performance:

💃🏾 0 people added to automations
📧 933 people have opened my emails (32% of the total - up 3% WoW)
🖱️ 206 clicks on our pitch deck (22% of those who opened - up 23% WoW)
↩️ 40 people have replied so far (4% of opens - up 25% WoW)
📞 1x call booked and 1x in progress (down 30% WoW)

The number of people clicking on our pitch deck link was the most significant change to the stats this week as I had a 96% increase week-on-week. This is important as it shows that investors are at least taking the time to read our material (and hopefully all of them look before replying). This week, I’ll look at adding my calendar link to see if that also helps improve the CVR.

Other things that happened this week:

Reconnected with partners by sending the first email update of the year
Finalised work paperwork with the developers we’re working with
Got plenty of help with our event space — several people in the community came through with wonderful suggestions
I was asked to be interviewed for a newsletter & completed a podcast interview (all inbound requests).

TIP FOR ANALYSING AUTOMATIONS: Collecting relevant data will help you to constantly imporve and iterate your automations. The usual open rates, CTR and reply rate will tell you how engaged people are. Also, look at the percentage of those who have opened that have taken an action (e.g. clicked or replied) as they are the most engaged people.

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Biggest L’s 🤕

LOSS 😩: I hit an emotional low after a busy week

Last week was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

Having written down all of the wins of the week, it’s clear that it was far from bad. I achieved a lot and met some wonderful (and supportive) people. But I felt very low for the entire week, to the point that I took it easy on Friday to help myself recover from what felt like a few emotional sucker punches to the gut.

As someone who usually very content, I find it really difficult when my emotions start to yoyo. And, it’s even worse when I can’t quite figure out what caused me to feel so low in the first place.

The beauty of writing this newsletter every week, is I get a moment to reflect and try to understand what happened and why. I sense I felt low this week for a few reasons:

Feeling uncertain about how investors perceive me and our product: It’s no secret that feedback is a rarity in the investment space. This isn’t helpful for people like me who like having feedback to constantly iterate and improve.
Feeling overwhelmed about the amount of things on my to-do list: It feels never-ending and, while I’m getting better at prioritising, this doesn’t take away from the fact that there is a lot to do.
Feeling mentally drained: Each week comes with challenges, moments where I have to have tough skin and continue to persevere. That’s all mentally quite taxing and can leave me feeling winded after long periods.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things that contributed to my feeling low last week, but these three seemed to be the big ones. I don’t have solutions for any of them right now, but identifying what’s draining my battery is the first step to making it somewhat better.

I also think this is symptomatic of being a solo Founder. As the sole person leading Mane Hook-Up, I carry a lot at the moment. I expect that to change once we have our new Head of Product and Engineering, when I’ll have a chance to lighten the load.

Until then, I’ll do what I can to silence the odd negative thoughts that crop up and continue to rely on my tribe to pick me up when I’m low.

TIP FOR BOUNCING BACK FROM LOWS: One of my adviosrs gave me some great advice last week, and I'd like to share it with anyone who's struggling at the moment. Get a diary, and list all of the major achievements you've accomplished while building your business and fudraising (with dates). Everytime you have a low day, take a look at the list and acknowldge just how far you've come.

💡 Lessons learned

Quote of the week
Growth and comfort do not coexist.
— Virginia Rometty

LESSON 👩🏾‍🏫: Time out to recover can be the best emotional healer

As we found out last week, I’m not great at taking breaks 😅

After physically recovering from a cold (that I probably could have avoided, had I taken a couple of days off), I found myself on an emotional battleground. But, instead of powering through, as I usually do, this time I gave myself some grace and took a much-needed break. Here’s what I decided to do:

Friday wind-down: I wrapped up early on Friday, only taking calls that had been scheduled and not working on anything (not even emails).
Pushed my newsletter production to Monday morning: I usually start writing 240 Days on Friday and finish it in chunks over the weekend (as some opportunities will crop up on Saturday/Sunday too). But this time, I moved my email production to Monday, cutting it slightly fine as I publish on a Tuesday morning, but ultimately removing all work off my plate for the weekend.
Celebrated and connected with my friends and family: The people I love and care about keep me driven, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than spending time with them. Given there have been some big life moments recently (e.g. my big sister just got engaged), I decided to spend my whole weekend in the company of my loved ones. We cooked together, celebrated, talked and vented about life. It was just what I needed.

Taking a slightly different approach to feeling low, not only allowed me to recover (feeling about 75% back to normal as I write this), but it has re-energised me for the week ahead and allowed me to focus on what really needs to be done.

So, while taking time out often makes me nervous about having enough time to get work done, now I can rest easy knowing that nothing will be set on fire if I’m out of action for a day or two.

💥 Hack of the week

How to create a data room for investors (without paying for a new tool)

A data room is a place where you can keep all of the important documents for your funding round, like:

Pitch decks
Financial models
Template terms/contracts
Marketing & sales strategies

Until last week, I hadn’t considered putting a data room together. Fortunately, an investor suggested that I do so (a good example of when feedback really does help). While there are a lot of tools you can use to create data rooms, many Founders won’t want to spend money on them and they will also want to make the process as simple as possible for investors.

If you fall into that category, I recommend using Google Drive as your data room. It’s simple:

Create a Google Drive folder
Drop all of your key documents into it
Change the sharing permission to ‘everyone with this link can view’ the contents of the folder OR give each investor access via their email address (which is more secure)

In a matter of minutes, you have a data room that can be shared with any Angel, VC or Syndicate that’s considering investing in your business.

📚 Resources

If you made it all the way to the end of this newsletter, you deserve a reward. So here’s a list of the best resources I came across last week to help you with your raise.

KPI tracker

Google Sheet KPI tracker by Andy Young: this is a great template for anyone who wants to track and analyse the performance of key business metrics, but doesn’t want the headache of building a new Excel. The template can be changed to a monthly or weekly view, allowing you to see exactly what’s happening inside the business.

🧰 Founder’s toolbox

Anyone who knows me knows that I love finding tools, apps and systems to add to my arsenal. Here’s a list of the best tools that I found last week.

Ansandra: free data room

What’s it for: Creating a data room to be shared with investors and advisors.
How it helped: Ansandra gives me a lot of control over who can see the documents in our data room. I can either give people access to the entire room by adding them to the account as a viewer, or you can create unique links for each document. The choice is yours!
Price: Free

Questions? 🤔

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,

J x

P.S. Here are some of my other posts:

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