Tzakhi (00:01.024)
Hi Christine.
Christine (00:01.998)
Hi, how are you?
Tzakhi (00:03.872)
Excellent. Thanks so much for being here. We're at the Meet That Capital startup podcast with Christine Outram, CEO of Everyday and also the writer of Startups with Christine, which is an excellent and highly recommended newsletter. And we've known each other for, I think about two years, right? Yeah, we were talking when you were doing one of your...
Christine (00:26.286)
That's right. Yeah, I made about two years ago.
Tzakhi (00:31.936)
equity crowdfunding campaigns for every day, which was very successful. And you're a serial entrepreneur. You've done so much. Why don't you tell us a bit about yourself? And I think our audience would love to hear about your experience and some of your ideas for how to raise capital.
Christine (00:51.342)
Thank you so much. So it's great to be here. And really I wear a couple of different hats, you know, so I'm a CEO of an education tech startup and have a background in a variety of different things. I am proof that you do not need to have one single career in your life. I've been everything from an architect through to a electric bike designer, all the way through to kind of designing software and hardware for a variety of different, different companies. But,
I wear my CEO hat by day and then by night I also run my own newsletter. It's called Startup with Christine. We are a weekly newsletter that will give you tips to help you grow your startup with way less stress. That all started because I've always coached startups. I've always helped them raise money and create pitch decks for going to investors and getting funding. But I realized that everybody was making the same mistakes I made when I was first starting out where...
We're working 81 to 100 hour weeks. We have this constantly long to do list, many fires to be fighting. And it's partly because being a startup founder is like drinking from a fire hose. You're trying to level up in a million different places at once. There's no going to school for this. You just have to kind of learn by doing. But there are ways that you can put systems in place. And, you know, kind of even some of the things you're doing with Meet Capital, you know, these are things that
I bet you and I wish we knew when we started out, but now we can actually share with our community and help them level up and grow much faster without the stress. So that's what Startup with Christine is about. My newsletter, that's my passion project. It is growing organically, which is fantastic. There's no better feeling than having a business grow organically. And in the meantime, I'm CEO of the Education Tech Startup every day.
Tzakhi (02:43.552)
Yeah, so look, dealing with stress and managing your time is an issue, I think for a lot of people, not only founders, but yeah, founders have a lot on their plate. But let's tie it a bit specifically to raising capital because I think when you're raising capital, what I see a lot of founders doing, they're chasing intros, they're trying to build their network and you never know where it's coming from. So there's a lot of...
running around haphazard kind of activities, events, and it's very hard to put structure into that.
Christine (03:23.342)
So true. And this is definitely an example of where I made a lot of mistakes the first time around. And what I find interesting about raising money is you have to have structure, but the same time you have to be flexible. And so what do I mean by that? I think when you have structure, it means you have a plan and a series of deadlines and you know, you have to kind of run your process as it were.
But you also have to be flexible because things come up that actually could be massive opportunities that you want to jump on straight away. But deadlines are probably one of the most important things that you can have with fundraising, in my opinion. And for a couple of reasons, firstly, you want to keep yourself accountable to how you're raising. But we also know that investors react really positively to actually being given structure. So what a mistake I see a lot of founders make is that when they contact investors, they're like,
Hey, we're raising, are you interested? And that's the extent of their outreach. And really what you need to be doing is controlling the process at all times. So saying, hey, we're fundraising. We're taking, you know, we're asking for people to be interested by this date. After that, we're gonna move into our next stage. And so you give them kind of a window of opportunity, which creates a little FOMO and gets people to raise their hand more quickly. And it helps you move the process along.
as well. So definitely one of the things that I've thought about a lot when it comes to fundraising is how do we put that flexible process in place to help get things to happen for us.
Tzakhi (05:01.184)
Yeah, and I assume that by doing that, you need to, you need to kind of, in the beginning at least, kind of force that structure in. It's not something that's coming from the outside. It's you have to decide and kind of try to push towards the goals that you've set for yourself.
Christine (05:18.51)
Yeah, you do. I mean, I'm sure this is something you've spoken about with your founders a lot is you just have to do it. You know, you'll have your list of people you need to contact. You do need to understand what their interests are and how to connect with them. And you just have to go through that process of, you know, checking off, have you emailed them, having some automations and things that can help you do that, which I know you help with. And yeah, it is, it's a lot of grant work fundraising, but I tried.
try to treat it like a game. Like for me, I probably had the most fun with fundraising when I didn't take it excessively seriously, but I took it as a challenge. I was like, I wonder how many people I can reach out to this week. Let's think of like this way to do it. You know, my goal is to have this many people by this date. Okay, let's look at the numbers. If I have to have 50 interested people, that means, you know, probably I'm going to have to have outreach to...
300 of them, or however many it might be. So how can I reach 300 of them this week? That's the type of game that I would set myself to make fundraising a little bit more palatable.
Tzakhi (06:28.288)
Yeah, and I know that you raise a lot through equity crowdfunding. Did you also raise from other types of capital? Like did you raise from VCs and maybe directly to angels? Okay.
Christine (06:39.79)
In other businesses, yeah, I've been part of both angel and VC funding. The most recent business, we did everything with equity crowdfunding for a couple of reasons. One, it was pretty new back then when we raised our first round. And I was excited about having a network of investors across the country that could help us grow. So I think having that marketing channel from our investors was really important.
but previously have worked both with angels and feces as well.
Tzakhi (07:14.368)
And with Everyday, did you kind of miss the component of maybe adding a VC? A lot of people try to kind of combine different types of capital and, or maybe even build it by stages. So what do you have to say about that?
Christine (07:30.254)
We initially went for angel and VC funding for every day. And, you know, we had this incredible team. We had spun our technology out from a previous company that had been purchased. We had all these good things going for us. But I think the issue that we ran up against, which a lot of founders face is that we were just slightly too early. We were slightly kind of on the early side. We didn't have enough traction for a VC to immediately say, yes, absolutely. This is a thing I'm going to.
doubled down on, we were also in a very crowded marketplace with a lot of competition. And that's something that I probably underestimated. When I went to, went to the VCs, I probably thought, you know, we great team, we can do this. We, you know, we're going to figure it out, but they saw it as a market that had a little bit of a boiled ocean aspect to it. And they wanted to have a little more early on early proof. So we moved away from VCs and
then went more with the angels. We have some angels in every day and then we have the equity crowdfunding as well.
Tzakhi (08:34.272)
And in previous ventures, you went without equity crowdfunding. You just went to angels and then VC.
Christine (08:42.222)
Yeah, it's funny, equity crowdfunding didn't exist for the previous ventures. And so we were more dealing with either venture capitalists who were acting as individual VCs or people who kind of came on with small firms. And then I've been part of other companies, less as a founder and more as an employee, early stage companies that have raised, you know, kind of series A's, B's, C's and onwards through larger VC firms.
Tzakhi (09:10.72)
Okay. What else do you want to tell us about like structuring your processes and time when you're raising capital?
Christine (09:21.134)
Yes. Firstly, I have a whole lot of deep dives for everybody who's listening to this so we can talk about it. One of the first things that I do is calculate what I call my raised math or raised maths if you're in another country. And what that looks like is firstly, you've got to be really sure as a founder how much money you need and you are looking at how much money you need for probably an 18 month.
Tzakhi (09:36.032)
Okay.
Christine (09:50.222)
period of time before you raise again. Um, and then working backwards from there, I'd look at what type of people to raise from. And I have a little spreadsheet that, you know, we can, we can link to as well, uh, where you can fill in how many, you know, what percentage of you around do you want from angels versus VCs versus, you know, other kind of capital. And then it will tell you based on, uh, the percentages of how many people will apply to your outreach, how many people you actually need to outreach.
to within a period of time to get enough meetings in order to then close your round. So that's one of the first things I do. Like I think it's easy to just start reaching out to people or to create, everyone tells you to create a list. Easy. But it's like, okay, but how many people do you need to put on that list is really the question that I like to answer first. And it's quite likely that you need to put five times as many people as who will actually say yes. So working out my raised math is.
the first thing that I go do. And then, you know, thinking about how to personalize my outreach and create connections even before I'm raising is the other thing that I think is vital for a founder. So constantly keeping in contact with people and figuring out, you know, how, whether our thesis fits their thesis and, you know, how we can connect and continue to stay in contact.
Tzakhi (11:16.416)
Okay, just before we get to that second part, first about the metrics. So how do you, you're sort of gauging what is going to be your success rate. Maybe you know that after a while, but when you're just getting started, you still don't know, do you have like, what assumptions should people make? I mean, when you're building a financial plan, you're making some assumptions and then testing them out later. But first you're doing that based on assumptions. So what should be the assumption?
Christine (11:43.31)
correct.
Tzakhi (11:45.216)
planning for your capital raise.
Christine (11:49.07)
That's exactly why I created the little spreadsheet model because different types of investors have different close rates. If you're going after family and friends, then obviously they trust you already. They probably have known you for years. They're going to be much faster to close and much easier to close. So you might have a family and friends close rate of 30 % of your family and friends will say yes. Then you jump up to your angel investors, smaller check sizes, which means it's slightly easier to say yes.
Tzakhi (11:52.576)
Okay.
Christine (12:18.83)
But it's not going to be as much as your family and friends. Maybe 15 % of those people are going to end up closing. And then you jump up to your VCs and maybe it's only two, three, four, 5%, but they're putting in a really large check. And so that's where in this little spreadsheet, you can enter the number you want and it will calculate how many people you need to reach based on those different close rates for the types of investors. And it's got to do with trust. I think ultimately people invest.
when they trust you to be the shepherd of this vision, even if things are not fully worked out yet, if you're an early stage company, that's okay. But they've got to have a good rapport with you and a good belief in you in order to get there. As well as looking obviously at market dynamics and everything else. But that's why it's harder to close, you know, bigger check sizes and people who you know less well, I think.
Tzakhi (13:15.936)
Yeah. And then the second part is you said networking. Can you tell a bit more about how you plan that?
Christine (13:25.23)
I, this one, I would probably do differently if I was doing my first business again. Over the years, I've gotten to know investors just through being in businesses, right? Like, you know, you pick up connections, you connect with people in a variety of different ways. But if I was in my first business starting out again, I would.
Tzakhi (13:31.904)
Okay, interesting.
Christine (13:50.414)
consciously, even before I tried to raise, like in the six to 12 months before I tried to raise, start to create relationships with interesting people. And, you know, I don't know how many people, LinkedIn is a little spammy these days, but I still get people reaching out to me that with a very compelling LinkedIn message that just want 10, 15 minutes of my time. And I'm often happy to give it if it's kind of a nice fit between what they're doing and what I'm interested in.
And that starts a relationship. I mean, look at us, we met a couple of years ago and now here we are talking about these things and you know, our kind of our paths have been crossing, which is great, but that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't have, you know, just connected. And it wasn't for any purpose except for just knowledge sharing and helping each other out. And so that's the type of thing that I would probably start doing again, or even as if you're ready to raise, keep doing it. One of the founders that I've been working with last year,
Tzakhi (14:36.96)
Right.
Christine (14:48.11)
She was like, oh, I need to raise right now. I'm like, but you don't know anyone. That's going to be hard to get their attention. And what we worked on was actually a strategy where she spent the first four to six weeks of her fundraise, just reaching out and saying, I'm going to be in San Francisco on this date for these two days actually was, I'd love to meet you. And there's an amazing forcing function when you actually say you're going to be physically in a place.
Cause everybody, anybody can hop on zoom, but you know, for her, she was living in Texas and then would flew to San Francisco for two days and flew to New York for two days and managed to line up all of these little meet and greet meetings where she didn't tell them she was raising. She just told them that she was interested in their expertise. She was interested in, you know, seeing what they thought of her thesis and it helped warm, you know, warm up the conversation, create that initial relationship so that six to eight weeks later, she could go back and go, you know what?
I've been getting so much interest from these little mini meetings I've been having. I'm ready to raise. Can we take the next step? It's got a very big parallel for anybody who's worked in sales or marketing. It has a very big parallel to that. I would say whereby it's next to impossible to sell something to someone who doesn't trust you, is a cold lead, doesn't know the problem that they have. You need to really warm people up and help them get that sense that.
Yeah, you're the person that they want to buy from, or in this case, invest in.
Tzakhi (16:19.296)
Yeah, and I think if you're reaching out to people that are investors and they know that you're a founder, even if you're not immediately talking about raising capital, they understand that either you're, that there's a good chance that you might be raising or will be raising in the future, or in general want some kind of.
help or collaboration or partnership around something to do with a business that you're either in or building. So it's not going to come as a kind of shock to them at a later stage when this comes up. And if they're willing to meet you even just to give some advice or just to exchange some ideas, like you said, somewhere in their head, they're open to other options. And it might not only be, you know,
an investment, sometimes meeting someone and building a relationship and getting an introduction can be even more valuable than the check because the check that you get from the person that has been introduced to you might be much bigger. So it happened with one of our companies that we work with. They connected with one investor through us, which gave them a very small check, but...
Christine (17:10.542)
introduction... yeah.
Christine (17:24.558)
Completely agree, yeah.
Tzakhi (17:32.192)
That person brought in a friend that invested $300 ,000 a couple of months later. But these things happen all the time, of course.
Christine (17:41.646)
You bring up a really good point, which is that it's like planting a lot of little seeds and then, you know, kind of some of those start to germinate and you get, you know, you get a return from them and it's an investor's job to have their finger on the pulse of who's doing what and which founder is starting which company. So it's not bothering them to reach out. I think sometimes founders get worried that they're like, Oh, this person's so busy. I don't want to reach out. It's like, actually no, it's their job to, to find interesting things to go and invest in.
However, it does come down to communication too. There's an art to reaching out to an investor with an email that will capture their interest and get them to get on a phone call. Some of the other coaching that I do with founders is how to craft that perfect messaging strategy or even a pitch deck.
How do you have a teaser pitch deck that you send out that doesn't give the full story, but at least people wanting more so that they get on a meeting? Bunch of different strategies around that and communication too.
Tzakhi (18:47.425)
Yeah, so yeah, we also suggest the same thing at Meet Capital. About the email, we have, I wonder what you think about that, but our outreach method is a blank connection request as a starting point on LinkedIn, but it's based on the assumption that your profile is set up in a way that if you reach out to an investor, they understand just from reading the headline of your profile, why you might
Christine (19:03.63)
Yeah.
Tzakhi (19:17.378)
be reaching out to them. And then if they don't accept the connection request, then it's obvious that they're not interested, but you haven't really, so to speak, bothered them or spent time crafting a message for them. Only if they're, and if they are interested in connecting, then good ground to assume that at least they want to hear what you have to say.
Christine (19:31.086)
That's smart.
Christine (19:39.662)
Yeah, every time your name is somewhere, whether it's your LinkedIn profile or whether it's your website or somewhere else, I think it's an opportunity to hone that so that anyone landing on there knows what's expected of them and whether to reach back out. It's, yeah, I think that's smart. The blank connection. You're not wasting your time on crafting the perfect message and getting stuck in kind of analysis of that too.
Tzakhi (20:07.296)
Yeah, and that way you can reach out to more people and spend more of your time sort of researching rather than writing messages. And so, yeah, but it's different than, on email you can't do that, of course. You have to start with a good email. Yeah. Yeah.
Christine (20:17.006)
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
That would be pretty funny to send a blank email. Just with your LinkedIn profile. Honestly that might work.
Yeah, breaking through the noise is also kind of an art at that point too. You know, how do you, how do you get creative? I've started sending video messages a lot more. You know, I use Loom to record a little two minute video because it helps people understand who I am emotionally. Sometimes when you see a pitch deck, the emotion doesn't come across. And especially in early stage investments, I think, yes, they're investing in the data.
and they're investing with their head, but they're also investing with their heart. There has to be a little kind of emotion there too, and those two things play off each other. So video messages work really well for those more in -depth conversations too.
Tzakhi (21:15.616)
Um, Christine, I'm curious, what do you think about the topic of, uh, posting on social media and using social media as a founder raising capital? Um, you can say it's a waste. It's a huge time suck for a group of people that are very, very busy is what you spoke. What we started with is, you know, 80 to a hundred hours a week of, of a mess and now adding another task, which is social media, which also grabs a lot of time and attention.
But of course the advantage is that you get attention and you're sort of growing your network. Even when you're not doing it, it just keeps growing for you. So what is your take on it? Maybe it's for different types of founders.
Christine (21:54.382)
Right.
Christine (22:00.046)
Exactly what I was going to say. I think every founder has a channel they gravitate towards that suits their personality. And that's a, you know, you can, me trying to be on TikTok every day, I would not be happy with myself. And so for me personally, social media isn't my thing. And I'm probably never going to try and raise that way personally. However, during our equity crowdfunding,
we certainly used an agency that would run ads for us through Facebook and through Instagram to get investors interested in visiting our equity crowdfunding page. So it can be used as a tool in that sense, but there are other founders I've met for whom being on social media, sharing their founder life and their startup life or posting routinely on a particular channel works well for them.
And it's not a struggle, it's not a stress. But when it feels like a struggle and a stress, it's like just something you need to do that you don't want to do, then to me, it's not the right channel for you. And you can find something else that you like better. I love writing blog posts. Why would I spend my time crafting an Instagram post when I could do an in -depth blog post on something that could bring a lot of value and ultimately could be used strategically to create a YouTube video or to create something else and be across a variety of different channels that then bring new eyeballs and new audiences in.
Tzakhi (23:30.496)
But it is content creation, so it's your favorite type of content creation, but you do take the time to create that content and then of course put it out there.
Christine (23:32.974)
true.
Christine (23:43.214)
I do. And I'm not using it right now for fundraising. So I think your question was slightly different, which is, is it useful for fundraising? Yes, I think it is. I think it's getting a little crowded in the way that you can target people who might be interested. And it's dependent also on the type of fundraising you're probably going for. So when we think about equity crowdfunding, we think about retail investors. So, you know,
Tzakhi (23:47.904)
Yeah, right.
Christine (24:10.094)
Um, investors that are investing not much money that may exist across the entire country are probably not what we'd call kind of sophisticated angel investors or VCs. They can be reached and, you know, kind of be introduced to your business through social media, probably quite effectively. Um, having said that, I don't know about VCs, like doing something on social media, unless you're getting a lot of attention in the right way. Um, may not, may not work. Twitter though, still.
Tzakhi (24:35.904)
Yeah.
Christine (24:39.054)
Legitimate or X is still legitimate. I think place to play for attracting VCs and angels. Yeah. Not my jam personally.
Tzakhi (24:47.232)
All right.
All right, Christine, thank you. This was great. Before we end, I asked you if you could prepare us five tips that you would give startups, and I'd love to hear them.
Christine (25:01.23)
Fantastic. So the first one is when you're a CEO, I think your job is everything across the business. But more than anything, I actually think you're a storyteller. And if you can think of yourself as a chief storytelling officer, somebody who can connect with investors, connect with your customers, you have to be able to tell a story that engages and delights and pulls people in both with heart and your head, which really is.
My second tip, constantly kind of think about how you're emotionally connecting with people and also how you're connecting with people on their head side as well. So on the numbers too, I find myself switching between those two things. And I think particularly for early stage fundraising, it's probably essential too. Number three is just a fun one just to think about as you create your websites and create your pitch decks and create anything that will help you raise money. It's eliminate the word help.
from your vocabulary. So this is one that is surprising, but once you see it, you'll realize that you do it. So instead of saying, we help people raise money for startups, you can just say, we raise money for startups. We teach you how to raise money for startups. We give you the tools to raise money for startups. The thing is with help is it always feels like you're doing half, like we help you, but you have to do the rest of the work. And I think when you, you know, when you're kind of speaking to someone, you want to...
Tzakhi (26:02.176)
Okay, good.
Christine (26:28.942)
You want to actually give them something and not just help them do it, but get them to achieve it. I probably used help a lot. Honestly, I probably used it in this very podcast. So, but it was something that a copywriter once told me and I went back and looked at my, looked at all my copy and I was like, Oh, I'm constantly using this word help. It's terrible. I telling a story of the future is really important as well. So when founders get asked how will your business grow?
Tzakhi (26:34.016)
I got to check all my copy now.
Tzakhi (26:45.152)
Yeah, it's brilliant.
Christine (26:57.678)
And this is often the number one determinant as to whether someone's actually going to invest in you. And a lot of early stage founders that I hear will say things like, oh, well, we're going to experiment with, and then they list a whole bunch of different things that they're going to experiment with. And it's kind of this big, long bullet point list. And I think where you have to turn the corner there is not just talk about what you're going to experiment with today, but actually what you expect the anticipated outcome of that thing will be in the future.
So you might not, you might, instead of saying, oh, you know what? Well, today we have, um, you know, 3 % of people landing on our website converting. You might say we have 3 % of people landing on our website converting. However, we plan to run ads at, you know, this dollar amount, which we anticipate will increase that conversion to 5%. And once we increase it to 5%, then we anticipate the revenue will be X, Y, and Z for three months out, six months out, 12 months out.
So you're constantly kind of projecting to what you anticipate the future outcome will be versus just speaking about today. So always tell the story of the future is my number four. And then my fifth one is just have fun. Life's too short to be stressed all the time. It's okay to, you know, take your foot off the brake, take your foot off the accelerator when you need to put your foot on the brake a little bit as well. Spend time with your family, with your friends and enjoy the ride.
Tzakhi (28:07.936)
Excellent.
Christine (28:26.158)
So it's my five.
Tzakhi (28:27.712)
Awesome, awesome, excellent, thanks so much. Christine, this was wonderful. Who should reach out to you and where?
Christine (28:36.654)
You can absolutely reach out to me at Christine at StartupWithChristine .com or just on my website, StartupWithChristine .com. You can sign up there, get the $1 .3 million pitch deck that I created, as well as a whole host of other information weekly as well.
Tzakhi (28:53.312)
Okay, I highly recommend it, I must add. So yeah, we'll put the link in the notes to the podcast and everywhere. Christine, thanks so much, this was great.
Christine (29:02.958)
Thank you, this is amazing. Yeah. Bye.
Tzakhi (29:06.048)
Bye bye.
