Please describe your proposed solution
Context:
Infrastructure has been helping the NEAR, Kadena, and ICP ecosystem founders jumpstart their fundraising pipelines with our Path to Capital service. The service typically lasts one month and is designed to get a pipeline of interested and warm investor conversations for the founder and then show the founder how to grow their own pipeline using the tactics that we used (social listening, leveraging referrals, conferences, and direct outreach) to grow their investor pipeline from a cold start.
We have conducted 18 of these engagements in the past year, and 2 of the 17 companies have received funding or options for investment rights into their companies. This is a significant increase from the standard .05% of startups that receive funding each year from venture capital (CB Insights). Here is a link to an end of engagement report.
We are looking at developing a tool that will help founders efficiently build their investor pipelines. This tool is based on our teams learnings of how to efficently gain introductions to investors a well as how to get in touch with investors in a short amount of time.
Here is how we envision the workflow.
Base data + social listening:
We start off by leveraging the Crunchbase API to allow users to pull in data and target the investors they are interested in speaking with. The user will then save the list of accounts. The user will then be asked to input keywords or phrases they want to receive alerts on when a contact in one of the accounts they have saved mentions a keyword or phrase on LinkedIn or Twitter. These alerts will come to the user each day for their review, and the user will be able to decide which conversations to engage with.
By leveraging LinkedIn and Twitter social listening, the user will be able to find engaging investor posts and comments on a daily basis, not waste time trying to find these opportunities but benefit from the tool serving these opportunities to the user each day. Social listening is not a new concept, but the current solutions (Sales Navigator, Hootsuite, etc) are costly and cumbersome and don't incorporate the behavioral data that shows the most approachable contact in the account.
Enrich the Data By Leveraging Human Behavior Signals:
Once the user has their account lists and social listening phrases set, we will show the user the most approachable person in the investor account based on their online behavior.
We have found that it is much more efficient to first understand who is approachable in an investor account than to try to blindly contact VCs or investors in an attempt to find the right person. We will take all of the contacts in the account and then filter them, and then highlight the contacts in the account that exhibit signs of being approachable.
These signs include posting frequency, if the contact replies to comments on their posts, frequency of comments on others' posts, sentiment analysis of their posts and comments, if they engage with people they don't know, what day of the week they are most active online, whether they post original or reposted content, what types of posts and content they engage with and whether or not they have given recommendations to others and how many recommendations. Here is an example of this concept on a spreadsheet.
These and other signals are all gathered at a contact level given a weighted score. The user will be presented with an account hierarchy map that will show them the most approachable contacts in that account stacked ranked from highest to lowest, thus saving the user a significant amount of time trying to break into new investor accounts.
The tool will also provide account recommendations like conferences attending and account penetration strategies (multi-threding account opportunities, etc.).
The user will then know which accounts/investor firms are the easiest for them to penetrate and engage with.
Understanding the best path for referral:
It is very common for the most socially approachable person in the account to also be the most connected person in the account to others within the investor firm. The most approachable person may not be the exact investor that the user will need to approach, but they will often be the "champion/connector" and will be able to provide a referral to the right person in the account.
Venture capital, family offices, and angels all prefer referrals as a way to signal early signs of credibility compared to cold outreach. This tool is designed to help the user effectively target those in the field who would be able and most likely to provide a referral.
Contact interface:
Once the user understands which contacts in the account to focus on and clicks on a contact in the account, they will be taken to the contact interface screen, where the tool will search through the past posts of the contact and provide contact recommendations like what conferences they are planning on attending, what they talk about, what they are most interested in. The tool will also pull up the contact's most recent comments and posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, prioritize the most engageable posts for the user to engage with, and start a dialogue with the contact.
Eliminate the inefficiencies of social prospecting:
The success of our Path to Capital service was mainly due to years of knowledge of how to use social prospecting to the founder's advantage. With this tool, we are taking the knowledge that exists within the company, eliminating the inefficiencies that exist with current social prospecting processes, and providing it to the Cardano ecosystem so more of its founders can quickly build their investor pipelines and get funded.