How to find the best investors for your startup

Many startups raise money from investors in order to progress to the next stage. Whether you have a great idea that you want to turn into a business, or you’ve already been operational for a while after building a product that customers need and enjoy, and now you just want to grow your company as much as possible — chances are, you don’t have enough capital and revenue to advance your startup to the next stage without money from investors.

Raising money from investors is never easy, especially for new entrepreneurs who lack the relevant experience. A large percentage of startups fail because they lack the funds they need for operation and growth, their revenue is currently not high enough, and they are unable to raise the funds they need.

Here, for example, you can see the chances of raising a follow-on round after your seed round:

So what can you, as an entrepreneur, do to increase your chances of getting funded?

In this post, I will explain how you can find and choose the most relevant investors for your startup, and how you can do effective outreach to those relevant investors.

I’ll explain how I did this for Israeli startups in the ecommerce and retail field — because our law firm represents a number of these startups and the lists I will show here will be valuable to our clients. However, the system is the same for any other field (cyber security, big data, education, etc.) in any other country.

This is how the final list of relevant investors in the ecommerce and retail field for Israeli startups looks like.

In this post, I will explain exactly how I made the list and how such lists should be used to get results.

Stage 1 – Building a list of investors

The first thing I do is to build a basic list of investors in the chosen field who are active in the geographic area of the startup.

Stage 2 – Adding information to the basic list

Stage 3 – Additional ways to increase your basic list

Stage 4 – Narrowing down the list of investors

Stage 5 – Building a list of partners and employees of relevant VCs

Stage 6 – Building a list of founders/officers/directors

Stage 7 – Reaching out to people

The issues with this system

In Conclusion