A Fundraising Survival Guide

There's a similar problem with making sales calls, or with any other activity that requires synchronous communication/interaction (i.e. not email).

I have the same problem.

Here's what i did. I was a consultant before I started raising money, so I could carve out a chunk of my time for fundraising before any money came in. When the money came in, I jumped over full-time. If you're not independent yet, maybe you could shift towards contract work for the next 2+ months?

Also consider raising from friends and family first. This money can has the potential to come quickly if it's going to come at all. BUT don't do this unless your relationships won't be affected by the worst-case scenario (100% loss due to your obvious incompetence).

And I know your second paragraph is hypothetical, but if you have a product, active users, and co-founders, then you probably have time to talk to investors. Answer emails at night, and schedule meetings around lunch or personal days. Saying that fundraising is a full-time job is a bit exaggerated, at least for angel investment; I've been raising for 6 months now with some success, and it's maybe been a 20% of my time.

That's easy. You do what most people do. Let yourself become unmotivated and distracted by working on your side project and your day job simultaneously. Then slowly begin neglecting your promising side project and let it fade into obsolescence and then finally into death.

If there was a reasonably pain-free solution to this problem there'd be far too many successful startups. Large corporations would have even more trouble hiring good hackers and the whole world would fall apart.

> [Investors] think they need a little more information to make up their minds. They don't get that there are 10 other investors who also want a little more information, and that the process of talking to them all can bring a startup to a standstill for months.

I wish there was a way to know the 90% of information that an investor might ask you ahead of time, and be ready by having those questions answered.

Excellent article about working with investors, but I'm not sure bootstrapping got a fair shake. 2 other ways to Bootstrap: 1) Getting a customer to pay up for a product up front. This is different from consulting, and this is not investment because you are not selling equity. 2) Building a niche product, with a market that is cheap to reach, and using cashflow to evolve product.

Case 1, the pain is equal to the number of customers you have to talk to to find this one or more that will fund your development. Subtract pain if you have good or opportunistic connections; subtract pain if you are a superb salesman; also subtract pain if you have experience in this exact product field before.

Case 2, the pain is in attracting the initial set of customers. Subtract pain if you have a lot of friends who will buy the product; subtract pain if you are natural evangelist (like PT Barnum) or have PR experience; subtract pain if the market is already ready to accept a product that you can build cheaply.