Straight from the founder: How to navigate a successful raise

This week, we share tips from Common Paper founder Jake Stein, all about navigating a successful raise during challenging times. We also highlight how founders can save tons of time with the DocSend + Zapier integration.

How Common Paper navigated a successful raise

After embarking on multiple business ventures and successfully securing $30 million of VC funding throughout his career, Jake Stein shares his insights and learnings. He walks us through how he navigated a successful raise during challenging times, including how to connect with investors for customer development and craft a winning pitch deck.

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Pitch deck interest metrics

Founder activity held steady last week while investors upped their pace once again. VC activity rose by 6.15% and is up nearly 13% year-over-year. In fact, investor deck interactions last week trailed only 2022 from a YoY perspective. This is impressive because of these years’ very different contexts: in 2022, VC activity started the year hot only to quickly cool off as the macro environment changed markedly. In 2024, the macro outlook may be shifting once again and investors have increased their pace each week of the year so far. Although we can’t expect this trend to continue indefinitely, it seems to signal a sustained increase in confidence in the fundraising environment. Founder activity was unchanged last week, but the fact that we’re just several weeks removed from an all-time January high is another indication of robust private-market confidence. We don’t expect the overall mood to shift appreciably in the next month or two, but check back over the coming weeks to see if the pace of the early-year rush slows down a bit.

Save time fundraising with these DocSend + Zapier integrations

While you’re stressing about putting together a compelling pitch deck and managing investor outreach, you're also operating your business—and the last things you want to deal with are the nitty-gritty details of project management and investor tracking. Software integrations can’t solve your biggest fundraising problems, but they can help you find small efficiencies that add up over time. Here we’ll talk about how to get the most out of DocSend’s Zapier integration, so you can save time and (hopefully) a little sanity.

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