👋 Hi, it’s Neal, and I’m here with a 🔥 edition of The Midnight Text, Forum Ventures’ bi-weekly newsletter that provides honest answers to the unspoken questions that keep founders awake at night.
I’m a Managing Director at Forum Ventures, guiding portfolio founders on the zero to one journey. I am a 2x B2B SaaS founder, and I grew my previous startup to $5M+ in ARR and raised over $30M in capital. I am an engineer by trade and an ultra-generalist in practice. For more stories like this one, please follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to my newsletter.
Every two weeks I run a fundraising prep session with our accelerator founders right before they go live with their raise. In the last session, I asked the room: “Who’s planning to start with your best investors — your dream funds, the ones you most want on your cap table?”
Almost every hand went up.
That’s the wrong answer. But it makes sense why.
Most founders spend months preparing for the pitch: the deck, the narrative, the traction slide, the presentation. A lot less thought goes into the outreach process: who you contact, when, in what order, and how. But the strategy to get in the room is just as important as what you do once you’re there. Get it right and you walk into every meeting with momentum already behind you.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the fundraising outreach process from raising over $30M, and guiding founders through raises with us at Forum.
When you’re building your investor target list, most founders think about fit. They research who invests at their stage, who’s active in their space, who has a check size that matches. That’s all correct. But fit isn’t enough. You also need to think about sequencing, as in the order and cadence in which you reach out to your list.
Stack your investors into three tiers:
Tier A — your ideal investors. Strong fit, right check size, you’d be thrilled to have them on your cap table.
Tier B — good fit, slightly less ideal. Maybe they’re a bit generalist, or the check is smaller, or you don’t have a warm intro yet.
Tier C — longer shots. Useful to have in the funnel but not where you’d anchor your round.
Now here’s the counterintuitive part: start with Tier B.
Your first five or ten investor meetings are not about closing. They’re about sharpening your pitch. You will say something wrong. An investor will ask a question you fumble. You’ll realize mid-call that your traction slide lands flat. This happens to everyone. The question is whether you want that to happen in front of your dream investors or in front of people you’re less attached to.
Use Tier B meetings to find the weak spots before you walk into Tier A.
Fundraising is an emotional process, not a logical one. This is the part that surprised me most when I raised my first round. I expected investors to behave rationally — to evaluate my deck, assess the opportunity, and make a clear yes or no decision.
That’s not how it works.
Investors respond to momentum. When they see a founder who has four meetings in the same week, who follows up fast, who has other investors asking questions — they pay attention. When they see a founder who’s been “fundraising” for three months with nothing to show for it, they get cautious.
This means the structure of your raise matters as much as the content.
Cluster your meetings. The goal is to run as many investor conversations as possible in a short window — think two to three weeks of intensive outreach. This isn’t about tricking anyone. It’s about the reality that fundraising momentum is real, and you need to manufacture it intentionally.
Cold outreach works sometimes. Warm intros work far more often. But not all warm intros are equal.
A warm intro from a founder who knows the partner personally is worth ten times a warm intro from someone who met them at a conference. Think carefully about the source.
Even better: get multiple people to reach out about you to the same fund independently. When three different trusted contacts mention a company to the same investor in the same week, it creates a kind of social proof that’s very hard to manufacture any other way. It also means the investor has heard your name three times before you even speak.
Before you go live, map your network against your investor target list. For every Tier A investor, ask: who do I know that knows them well? Then time those asks so the intro lands 3-4 days before you want the meeting — close enough that you’re top of mind when the investor opens their calendar, not so early that the intro goes cold while you’re still prepping.
I see founders burning time and credibility on excessive investor follow-ups. Here’s the rule.
After a meeting: send a thank you and your deck. That’s it.
After that: the only reason to follow up is if something meaningful has changed like a new customer, a revenue milestone, a term sheet from another investor. Not “just checking in.” Not “wanted to see if you had any questions.” Those messages signal desperation, and desperation kills deals.
If an investor is interested, they will move. Your job is to give them a reason to move faster, not to remind them you exist.
The founders I’ve seen close rounds fastest aren’t always the ones with the strongest companies. They’re the ones who ran a tight, structured process with clustered meetings, sequenced lists, multiple intros to the same funds, and clean follow-ups.
Fundraising is a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with reps. The best thing you can do is set up the conditions to get those reps efficiently.
Go get it.
Neal
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If you’re an early-stage B2B founder building something awesome and looking for your first check and unmatchable support, learn more about our accelerator here, and pitch us here.
If you’re an early-stage B2B founder with an awesome idea and/or deep domain expertise, and would rather build with an experienced team, learn more about our venture studio here.
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