The Most Underrated Way To Convince Investors — Backchanneling

I took last week off in Cape Town to celebrate both mine and my wife's birthdays.

I'm back from that one week hiatus to break down an important but rarely talked about step in the fundraising process — backchanneling.

Remember — investors are looking for reasons to de-risk your startup. They want to deploy capital, but startups are incredibly risky.

Backchanneling is one of the most effective ways to do this, even after a pitch meeting. Here's how it works and what a good backchannel request looks like 👇

Read time: 3 minutes

📚 What I've Been Reading

77% of founders admit they wish they better understood their numbers. Yet so much of the financial education out there is complex and intimidating to read.

That’s why I’m a huge fan of Kurtis and his newsletter. Each week he breaks down financial concepts in a super approachable way.

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⚡️ How to Backchannel with Investors

During a raise, you'll almost certainly speak directly with any investor who puts significant capital into your startup. But even if you hit on each of the many things that investors are looking for these conversations don't always address every concern an investor might have.

And even if an investor feels good about the deal, they'll want to gather opinions from people in their network either about you from mutual connections or from experts in your space that they know before writing a check.

Most founders think that there's nothing they can do at this stage and that once they've had the pitch meeting, they need to simply play a waiting game.

This is not the case. The best founders I know continue working on getting the investment by backchanneling.

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