Oversubscribed: A Founder's Guide to Seed Fundraising

Max (one of the authors) here. This is the book we wish we’d had when we were first raising money for our startups. It starts with the basics—should you even raise money at all?—and goes on to cover preparing your narrative, finding and engaging investors, and actually getting money in the bank.

After raising a combined $4M for our seed rounds, Mike and I found ourselves answering the same questions for other founders over and over. While there are some good fundraising resources out there already (we link to many in the book), we realized that there wasn’t a good source for the kind of guidance we’d needed when we were first raising our companies’ rounds.

For example, there are lots of great blog posts about setting terms and negotiating with investors. But when we were twenty-somethings outside of Silicon Valley with limited experience and connections, we needed help just figuring out how to even get in touch with angel investors in the first place.

Oversubscribed is free through September. We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks, and we’re here to answer questions about the book, our stories, fundraising in general, or anything else you’d like to ask!

Mike (the other author here). It was really fun to combine the non-fiction framework around effectively raising funding with our personal war stories.

For example, in the book I dive deep into a story to illustrate that "it's never a done deal until the money is in the bank."

One time, and angel investor saw me pitch at a pitch competition and committed to our angel round. I got docs signed and everything, and then spent two months getting other angels committed. I'd waited to get the money in the bank from that first investor, and when I reached back out to get his investment wired, he went completely cold. I ended up having to convince his assistant to schedule a meeting with him in NYC.

When I took the bus up to NYC and met with him, he'd basically forgotten what my startup did and made me re-pitch him on the spot and remind him how much he committed investing. That wasn't the end of it though – I ended up having to schedule another meeting like that for the sole purpose of picking up a check when he got too busy to wire the money.

You'll find a more thorough explanation of that story (and more) in the book!

> One mistake founders make is thinking that they need to be finding a lead investor first. By allocating chunks of your round into portions that are available for three types of investors — lead VCs, follow VCs, and angels—you can create a lot more urgency out of the gate

...

> If you talk to a VC who says they’d be interested in following if you found a lead, you should tell them that you have limited spots for follow VCs

Really interesting way to create urgency when there may not be any (yet).