Good morning boys and girls.
Shaan here. You signed up about a week ago for my All Access Pass. A quick reminder of what that is, since attention spans last 7 seconds, let alone 7 days..
Who am I?
What is this?
A 120-day challenge.
I talk a lot about "ideas" on the My First Million podcast...this is about execution.
I'm going to show you how we launch $1m+ ideas, from scratch. I've partnered up with some listeners from the podcast to launch these babies & i'm documenting the whole thing as part of the All Access Pass.
What's the point?
Have some fun. Work on some cool shit. Make some money. And do the whole thing in public so people can learn from it / be entertained by it / take inspiration from it.
What are these emails?
You're on the free plan, so you get a once a week recap of the execution playbook we're running for each of these.
What are people saying 1 week in?
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The first $1M+ idea that we're executing is: Launch a Rolling Fund
The first step here is to: “Raise $1m+ from investors I've never met before, in 4 weeks"
I love investing in startups, I've put about $350k of my own money into startups over the past couple years. I usually write $25k checks into each company, and own a tiny slice.
Now I'd like to raise a $1m+ fund, to invest in startups.
To make this hard, I'm not going to raise any money from friends or family. I'm going to raise $1M+ from people I've never met on the internet.
Why? Because, I want to show people how I go about raising money - because every founder should know how to raise capital from investors for their projects.
I'm splitting it into 3 categories:
- Hot Leads - people who know me, and have reached out in the past about investing
- Warm leads - people who know me, and might be interested if I pitch them
- Cold leads - people who don't know me, but maybe I can get them interested
The hardest part of this is the time frame. Can I do this quickly? It's never good to take a long time fundraising. First - a slow fundraise is a bad fundraise. Slowness kills the momentum of the raise. Second - raising $$ is a means to an end. Every minute you're raising money, you're not growing the business itself.
So anyways - I started this on September 1st - and 5 days later (SPOILER) we are at $1.7M raised already (we raised a bit more after the tweet below). We have investors from 5 different countries, with zero friends or family in the fund so far.
Obviously, a lot of the investors are podcast listeners, so it wasn't totally an "overnight success." Because they've listened to me talk about startups for 100s of hours they were happy to trust me with their capital. Still - $1.7M is no joke. And I wanna share the system with you that we used to make it happen.
So even though I thought 4 weeks was an aggressive target, we did it in 4 days.
Here's how those 4 days went down:
- Day 1 - A project Kickoff (this is how I start every project. Setting goals & anti-goals, etc..)
- Day 2 - Creating the Sales Pipeline
- Day 3 - Nailing our Pitch Deck
- Day 4 - Dealing with Rejection
After each week, I grade our performance:
Every week of every project with my team, I grade two things: Execution & Results.
This is one of the first times I remember giving an A+ on both.
- Execution = we focused on the right things, and got them done violently.
- Results = we blew past our goal and raised $1.7M in 5 days.
What am I going to do with this money? Well I am making a couple investments in this year's YCombinator batch of startups.
I did a few breakdowns of the batch that I can share here as well:
- Trends I'm seeing in the batch (Shopify for X, and X for India)
- My 5 least favorite companies in the batch
- My 5 favorite companies in the batch
have a good monday,
shaan
