Question 1

How does Investable work with founders and funders?

Accepted Answer

Our mission is to align and connect founders and funders. We create alignment by helping founders look at their business from an investor’s perspective, and by doing due diligence with founders, rather than against them. We find opportunities to de-risk their business, make investment opportunities clear and compelling, and find the best-fit funding options to prepare to become investable. We also work with funders to understand their preferences, and find founders and investment opportunities that match their focus and goals. 
 
When we find a founder and a funder that we think should know each other, we connect them and help both the founder and funder surface and share information that makes due diligence simple and delightful.
 
Our services: 
 
- Founder services include: structured due diligence, capital strategy, fundraising preparation, and helping founders enroll the right human and financial capital to de-risk their business and execute their business goals. 
- Funder services include: matching, deal screening, deal introductions, and bringing together the right operators to make a company successful.

Question 2

What outcomes should I expect from working with Investable?

Accepted Answer

1. A clear capital and growth roadmap - We help you know (and clearly explain) your growth roadmap and the capital structures you’ll use to fund your goals.
2. A strong, aligned team - We help your team engineer alignment  about where you’re going and pull together to get there. 
3. A clear value proposition for investors - We help you build clarity and evidence for your most important investment opportunities, and make it easy for investors to understand why you’re a good investment. 
4. Known risks and mitigation strategies - We help you find the risks that could keep you from executing on growth and fundraising, and build mitigation strategies to make your company durable and valuable.

Question 3

How much does it cost to engage with Investable?

Accepted Answer

We are committed to creating more value than we capture. We are not a broker-dealer, so we don’t take a percent of money raised. Our fees are less than the cost of an executive, and on a sliding scale that is responsive to the company’s stage, cash flow, and complexity of the engagement. We charge $2.5k-$12k per month. 
Similar consulting services are generally only available to bigger corporations and priced at an average of $50k per month. Some charge a percentage of capital raised, and some charge equity without any guarantee of adding value. We want to see good businesses grow and succeed regardless of stage or company size, so our pricing model reflects that.

Question 4

How long is an engagement?

Accepted Answer

We start with an initial set of “Foundations” workshops that are tailored to a founder’s stage and readiness for due diligence. We begin by establishing a baseline for fundraising readiness and operational capabilities, which can take 2 to 4 months to complete depending on the company. We take the approach of structured due diligence because it allows us to uncover blindspots together and also prepares founders for what it will be like when they’re working with potential investors.
 
After completion of “Foundations”, we work with companies on a monthly basis to help them refine their capital strategy, improve on their execution, and engage in fundraising.

Question 5

I’m an entrepreneur, but I’m not sure if I want to raise money. Can Investable still help?"

Accepted Answer

Yes! Our most successful clients are those that are considering raising money, but want to explore whether it’s the right time to raise, what type of funding to seek, and which investors to meet. The best founders are careful about taking other people’s money, and want to be sure they know what they are getting themselves (and investors) into. Founders and funders must be aligned in their vision for success.

Question 6

What other benefits does Investable provide beyond help with fundraising?

Accepted Answer

We are exceptional at helping companies save time in raising capital and we are experts in developing Capital Strategies. Though many people only think of capital as cash, we also use the lens of Capital Strategy to  increase your precision about how you create value by spending other critical resources like your time, attention, and connections. We also enable Founders to become masterful operators and managers through our “Precision Execution” systems—the structured process of writing down short- to long-term plans, aligning them with the team, and holding everyone mutually accountable. Using established best practices, we can help move you away from putting out fires towards delivering on your definition of success.
 
Oftentimes, Founders have some type of system for setting strategy, but it’s really hard to measure progress, maintain accountability, and keep a team aligned and coordinated. This leads to a lot of accidental decision-making, disagreement about what success looks like, and can lead to poor execution. After working with nearly 200 companies,  we’ve seen that precision execution skills are required to run a flourishing business. By gaining mastery of these skills, external funding is often a byproduct.

Question 7

What is capital strategy and/or a capital roadmap?

Accepted Answer

Capital strategy means designing capital structures, raise amounts, raise timing, and raise sources to align resources with your growth roadmap. You can intentionally fund your growth and lower your cost of capital by improving the clarity of your growth and fundraising plan. We work with founders to create a Capital Roadmap that details their plan for the current round and a long-term strategy for proactively fueling value creation over time.

Question 8

Why should I work with Investable for fundraising? I think I can raise money myself.

Accepted Answer

Then do it! Many entrepreneurs can do it themselves and we will never work to convince founders that they can’t. We don’t fundraise for founders—we are an extension of their team to make the process simpler and more delightful. We started Investable to be a partner to entrepreneurs who haven’t been part of hundreds of fundraising events, created risk mitigation systems, or learned about hundreds of funding types. Building a business is hard enough and takes a lot of energy. Finding the right resources shouldn’t have to be.

Question 9

How long does it take to raise funds after starting an engagement?

Accepted Answer

It depends. When companies are prepared, most raises can take anywhere from 3-6 months. Companies that are more ready to present their information to the world can expedite this process. 
 
It takes 2-4 weeks once someone is ready to connect with external investors: we send a tailored message, do outreach and schedule time to connect, set up appointments and then post a deal screen for both parties to self-select to opt in to due diligence together. These are industry standards for any equity fundraise. 
 
It can take 2-12 months of due diligence depending on the investor and the company's interest and preferences. How Investable decreases time in that process is by matching founders and funders with the highest likelihood to enter into due diligence AND by preparing founders so the time spent in due diligence is greatly decreased.

Question 10

Can you guarantee that I'll raise money?

Accepted Answer

No. Nobody can guarantee that. If they do, they are lying to you.

Question 11

Why should I work with Investable? I think I can raise money myself.

Accepted Answer

Then do it! Seriously.
 
We’ll never try to convince you that you can’t do it yourself.
 
We started Investable because entrepreneurs often have to work full-time for 6-12 months to raise money by themselves. If you have that time to spare, or access to ready and willing investors, you truly don’t need Investable’s services.

Question 12

How does Investable make money?

Accepted Answer

We operate like most investors and make our wealth through investing in the founders with whom we are a good fit. The fees we charge in an engagement are meant to cover our operating  costs. We intentionally keep our fees low so as not to extract cash out of a business that needs it for growth. We’ve been founders too and know what it would have meant to get access to resources like this before raising capital in our previous businesses. This is our version of paying it forward.

Question 13

Will you invest in my company?

Accepted Answer

Of the 180+ companies we’ve worked with, we’ve invested in 5. 
Like many funders, we aim to be a strategic, value-add investor. There is a lot more money out in the world than in our pockets, which is why we focus on helping founders and funders beyond just Investable align and connect. Our goal is to help founders find the best resources and best-fit investors. Only a small percentage of the time is Investable the ideal investor.

Question 14

Are you an incubator or accelerator?

Accepted Answer

No, we are neither. Incubators and accelerators often match 1-2 facilitators with a large cohort of companies. We flip that, and give each founder the attention of our whole team. We do a lot of the same consulting work that a company like McKinsey or Bain would do, except we’re doing it for companies that could never afford their services.
Incubators and accelerators also often work with only one type of investors, and only make money when other investors invest at a higher valuation. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we’ve found that multiple rounds of equity capital isn’t always the best capital roadmap for a founder’s growth goals. We leverage our experience as operators and investors to help find and enroll the exact resources that make a company durable and valuable.
We believe there are founders of all types, stages, and growth goals with great businesses. We work to meet a founder where they are, define success as they see it, and help them find the right resources for their business. By truly understanding what a founder's definition of success is, we can also identify investors who also want to participate in causing that reality.

Question 15

How are you different from a broker dealer?

Accepted Answer

Broker-dealers are largely hired to raise money for a company. Going to a broker-dealer is one way to fund your business, but broker-dealers take a percentage of money raised as a compensation model, so their incentive is to raise money for founders regardless of whether there is a good fit between a founder and funder. These incentives can create misalignment between founders and funders.
 
The companies that raised money after working with us did it not because of any relationship leverage we used or they used. They raised money because they solved big risks in their business that caused noticeable increase in enterprise value. They created and shared powerful value propositions with their ideal investors and authentically enrolled those investors as team members in their journey. In other words, they became investable.

Question 16

Can I pay you based on the money I raise?

Accepted Answer

No. This creates misaligned incentives. Our goal is to help you become capital-efficient and lower the amount of capital required to meet your business goals.

Question 17

Why do you collect so much information in your questionnaires?

Accepted Answer

This level of granularity and precision is what any savvy investor will require. We do due-diligence with founders not against them so our goal is not to be skeptical investors.  Our goal is for founders to see and know what the highest bar is. We take all the data inputs and assess a founder’s readiness for fundraising, create a custom plan for preparation, and precisely match them to the right resources and investors based on their preferences.

Question 18

Will you help me make my pitch deck better?

Accepted Answer

Yes! We love helping founders craft their messaging (as long as founders don’t expect that a single document is what’s preventing them from winning investment). Investors don’t invest because you have a great looking pitch deck. They invest because founders can showcase the clarity and evidence required to support their investment thesis.

Question 19

Tell me about your team.

Accepted Answer

We are investors and entrepreneurs ourselves. Everyone on our team has either started, scaled, invested, raised money for or exited their own businesses and investments. Many are here at Investable because they have been where an entrepreneur or investor is right now and care deeply about helping other founders and funders achieve their goals. Check out our Team page to get acquainted with the amazing humans we work with.

Question 20

How do you find high-fit matches?

Accepted Answer

If we believe a founder and funder are a match, we always work to get them connected. We’ve built systems to help founders and funders better access their networks (ourselves included). We surface investors in 3 places:
1. Investable’s network: By virtue of being entrepreneurs and investors, we know a lot of great founders, operators, funders, and academics. We are consistently working to grow our networks in order to better serve our founders and funders in meeting each other.
2. A founder’s network: After working with nearly 200 companies, we’ve discovered that founders almost never fully activate their network. We help by surfacing and enrolling great people in their network, in their advisors’ or board’s network, and in their existing investor’s network. 
3. Extended networks: Our process and technology helps you identify, out of the tens of thousands of founders and funders, those that best fit you.

Question 21

How do I get connected with high-fit funders?

Accepted Answer

Some investors will be in our network, so we will have relationships with them, and in that case, we will reach out. Some of them will be in your network, so in those scenarios, you are the best person to reach out. If you're doing any outreach, we will fully leverage all of our tools so you get connected with the right person and are prepared for a successful conversation. All outreach will be well-crafted and highly contextual, and we work to put you in a position so that in any conversation you are prepared. If they're outside of our collective networks, our investment science team assists us in understanding who is the best person to conduct the outreach, whether that’s you or us.

Question 22

Does Investable work with international entrepreneurs and investors?

Accepted Answer

We've worked with many international entrepreneurs and investors that were based in Germany, Sweden, England, Portugal, Brazil, India, and Italy, to name a few. We've spent time in places like Singapore, Europe, Africa, and Shanghai looking at and studying the markets. We aspire to become a global, early-stage funding resource.

FAQ'S