as a founder who recently raised money for their business

as a founder who recently raised money for their business, the number one question I get from people just getting started is how do you find and secure investors. Not a lot of people are transparent about this process. They say things like make a pitch deck and join founder networks and the vagueness is giving they got a small loan of a million dollars from their parents or something. I always think the most helpful advice is really specific examples of how it works for other people. So I'm gonna go through step by step on how I raised my first million. If I had known any of this a year ago, it would have been a much shorter and less painful process. So here's what ended up working for me. So I did in fact listen to the people talking about founders networks. These are communities for different types of founders. There are networks for women founders, for LGBT founders, things like that. There's a lot of them here in New York City. So I joined a couple of those right off the bat to just try to get my footing. And one that I joined hosted something called a Founder Investor Speed Dating event. It's basically where you get paired with different investors and you pitch them right there on the spot. Through this event I got matched with an angel investor. This is an individual investor who invests on their own accord or through a family fund, not with a venture capital fund. Can talk more about that in another video if you want. But this person immediately believed in the vision, invest in my vertical. I was talking about education and edtech and that's something they loved. And I got kind of lucky because this person also went to grad school with someone I knew. Just a coincidence, but luck definitely plays a role in all this. I will not lie, that was my first real investment in the company. Second investment I got in my startup was also from an angel investor. This one I met through a different founders network. I actually went to a sort of founder investor speed dating event similar to the last one. Nothing really happened there, but I met another founder who hosts a lot of gatherings for people working on startups, building business ideas. And I actually went to a dinner he hosted. And through that event, I ended up meeting randomly a guy I sat next to who was interested in the idea. And after just one phone call, invested $50,000 in the startup. Angel investor No. 3, another serendipitous moment, definitely a theme here, is someone that I met at South by Southwest, the innovation conference. I went to the edtech side, which is the first week of South by. Basically, I went to one of those founder investor meetups, very similar type of thing. I had no luck meeting the people with the investor colored name tags. They were all being swamped. I end up just sitting at a picnic table to have a drink and last little bit, meanwhile this guy who's not even wearing the investor name tag sits across from me. We chat a little bit. He's interested. He also happens to be from New York. When we go back to the city a week later, we meet up for a drink and he invest $25,000. Angel investor No. 4 is someone that I technically met through LinkedIn. It was a series of intros and I could do a whole video series about using LinkedIn to raise money in not the most obvious ways that you would think. I've never posted about my fundraiser or anything like that, but through an intro that led to an intro that led to an intro, I met an angel investor who gave me a quick $6,000. This is where some real momentum started coming in. I would say my cadence before was like two checks a month max. Here's where it all started to snowball on top of each other. So Angel No. 5 is someone I met at a conference. I went to an education conference and I spent the little bit of money I had so far on a booth to really increase my visibility and give myself a stage and some validation to talk to more investors. While I was there I met an investor who was actually part of a VC fund, but they thought my company was a bit too small for their fund. But the partner was personally interested in my mission and so he invested outside of the fund his own hundred thousand dollars in the company. Now we're getting into the VC investments I made and you'll see these checks start to get a bit bigger. So in case you don't know, angel investors are individual investors who are investing on behalf of their own money or maybe their family's money. And VCs are venture capital firms. This is a company essentially that raises money from other individuals and invest on behalf of a lot of people so they can do bigger check sizes and they're looking to grow really big companies. So raising VC money is not for everyone. I can break that down later, but it does often mean bigger check sizes. Both the 1st and second VC funds that I got introduced to, both of which have a really great reputation and I'm so happy to have on my cap table, I met through a podcast. So not the most traditional route. I went on a show called The Pitch. Can talk more about that later, but I met two amazing VC funds there and I feel like once I got them on my cap table, things really started to snowball. That podcast had their own fund and they also ended up investing in the company through that fund. Got one more VC that also ended up snowballing through that original Founders Network I joined. It was a month long conversation that finally resulted in a fifty thousand dollar check. And this is the big one. I got into an accelerator program that came with $500,000 in funding. I think that having some of the momentum in funding already was part of the reason I was accepted to this. However, it was my second year in a row applying to that program, so definitely make a video about that too. But if you can get into a big reputable accelerator program, that can definitely fill out a lot of your early funding needs. And this is about the point where I actually started turning investors away. VC is a FOMO game, meaning that once one big fund invests, a lot of funds want in. So it can all seem to go from 0 to 100 really fast. But I took one more hundred and fifty thousand dollar check from a fund that was really mission aligned and I felt really excited about and we capped it at one million at that point to kind of reevaluate, think about our valuation and go from there. A year ago I truly did not know what a VC fund was. So if this all feels very intimidating, just know that you can learn really quickly. It's not impossible to get your foot in the door of these places. I truly didn't know a single one of these people before I started the process. And also this list doesn't show the dozens and dozens if not hundreds of people who said no. You just gotta keep going, you just gotta keep pushing and I promise it's possible. Let me know what would be helpful to hear about next when it comes to funding startups, anything like that.