[Fundraising for Startups] Lesson 17: How do you go about following up with investors?

Before you follow up with investors, you need to know two things about them:

• They have zero incentive to tell you "no."
• They're getting pitched a million times a day -- things slip through the cracks.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about it.

First, about the investor's incentives: if they're not in your deal, they're incentivized to string you along for as long as possible. It's not nice but it's perfectly rational behavior on their part.

If they say "no" to you, they run the risk of killing their own deal flow (because you'll complain to your friends) or, even worse, they run the risk of missing out on your deal when the next investor says "yes."

Second, about things slipping through the cracks: the vast majority of investors are good people but they're super busy. They're not out to screw with you or otherwise deceive you, they're just busy and things slip through the cracks. (Hell, I just realized that I dropped the ball on a founder that I met two weeks ago and I emailed him just a moment ago.)

As an entrepreneur, the best thing you can do is to be politely persistent but how you follow up is based on what happened in the last meeting. If you felt like the investor wasn't jumping for joy after the last meeting, your follow up needs to contain some sort of positive news (read: traction or sales update). If you felt like the previous meeting went well, there's no harm in reaching out a few days later to "bump the email to the top of the inbox."

Sound good?

Great. Good talk.

-P